P.M. BRIEFING : Soviets Warn of Ozone Depletion, Plan 2 New Arctic Research Posts

The Soviet Union is establishing two more Arctic research centers to forestall “ecological disaster” and monitor depletion of the ozone level in the vast frozen region surrounding the North Pole, Tass said today.

The official Soviet press agency said the government’s third and fourth monitoring stations will be set up outside Murmansk, a city of 426,000 e near the Finnish border on the Barents Sea, and on the Norwegian island of Spitzbergen.

“An ecological disaster may occur in the atmosphere of the Arctic,” Tass said. “Some scientists believe that the density of the ozone layer, which protects the Earth from ultraviolet solar radiation, has been depleted there in recent years.”

The Arctic includes the 5,500-square-mile Arctic Ocean, the Bering Sea, Greenland, most of Iceland, the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, and the extreme northern sections of Alaska, Canada, Norway and the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Arctic territories are the frigid region’s most developed areas and form vast storehouses of mineral wealth, including huge deposits of nickel, copper, coal, gold, uranium, tungsten and diamonds.

The Soviet Union was at the forefront of intensified efforts beginning in the 1960s to search for mineral and power sources in the Arctic, one of the world’s most sparsely populated regions.

“The (Soviet) scientists’ particular concern is aroused by the rapid increase in economic activity in the Arctic, which is the main cause of atmospheric pollution in high latitudes,” Tass said.