Expedition diary — insights into the history of organizing and conducting Russian Arctic expeditions in the early XX<sup>th</sup> century

Abstract

The collections belonging to the Museum-Archive of the history of study and development of the European North of the Barents Center of the Humanities — Branch of the Federal Research Center «Kola Science Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences» (BCH KSC RAS), contain several handwritten diaries by members of Arctic expeditions organized in the first half of the XXth century. The article discusses the value of the expedition diary of a member of a Russian Arctic expedition to Dikson Island (1916), the hydrometeorologist Innokenty Tikhomirov (1890–1955), as a possible source of data on the history of organizing and conducting scientific research in the Arctic. Based on the data presented in the diary, the paper reconstructs the progress of work on the organization of the northernmost meteorological station on Dikson Island in 1916.