 An appropriate ice floe was searched for from "Akademik Fedorov" research vessel, accompanied by nuclear icebreaker "Russia", using MI-8 helicopters, for a week, until an ice floe with an area of 16 square kilometres was found.The ice has since shrunk significantly, however, and the station is now being abandoned ahead of schedule.Since the mid-2000s it became difficult to find a suitable ice floe to station camp on, due to global warming, and several stations had to be evacuated prematurely because of unexpectedly fast thawing of the ice, so in 2008 an idea to replace the ice camps with a drifting research vessel as a station core was floated.