During the second Arctic: Breaking the Ice, National Forum and Festival of Volunteers, volunteers lifted part of a sunken ship weighing 80 tons from the bottom of Kola Bay in Murmansk. A special floating crane was used.

“There’s a warship graveyard here, ships that were never disposed but that simply sunk here,” Andrei Nagibin, head of the Clean Arctic project office, said.

Also on Youth Day, several hundred volunteers collected 24 bags of plastic, 67 bags of household waste, 13 bags of glass, and 11 bags of metal on 1.5 kilometers of the coast along Kola Bay.

During past events, forum volunteers have cleaned about 12,000 square meters of the western coast of Kola Bay and collected 30 cubic meters of garbage during the night cleaning.

All the events were held as part of the Clean Arctic’s second Arctic: Breaking the Ice National Forum and Festival of Volunteers held as part of the plan for Russia’s chairmanship of the Arctic Council in 2021-2023. The chairmanship event operator is the Roscongress Foundation.

About 200 people from 89 regions of the Russian Federation took part in the events, and also volunteers from Mongolia, Bolivia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Slovakia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The speakers at the forum were representatives of federal and regional authorities, legislative bodies, heads of the Russian Arctic regions, and experts from environmental organizations.