FEATURES IN THE ORGANIZATION AND IMPLEMENTATION OF RADONOMETRY FOR SEISMOTECTONIC PURPOSES AT TRANSPORT AND ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE CONSTRUCTION SITES IN THE PERMAFROST ZONE

Problem statement. The paper analyzes the few explorations performed in this field and the conclusions obtained during the research. In reality, a comprehensive study of gas-saturated frozen soils has not been carried out at present. This has not been done either in geocryology as a whole, or within its specific lines: mechanics of frozen soils, structural geocryology, dynamic geocryology, and especially cryo-seismotectonics. There are only individual works that fragmentarily consider specific issues related to the gas saturation of frozen rocks, mainly in areas of gas- and oil production. But in modern conditions, this position should be radically revised, since a practical need has been formed to study the structure, properties, and seismotectonic processes in the zone of permafrost soils. In recent years, specialized emanation (including radon) research, conducted both in combination with some shallow geophysical work (electrical tomography, microseismic sounding, high-precision gamma spectrometry) and independently, have received some development in the countries of the Arctic (Canada, the US state of Alaska, Greenland, Spitsbergen, northern Eurasia) and Antarctic zones, as well as some internal regions of Asia (the Himalayas, Mongolia). This was because the gas component is an important feature of permafrost. The goals of such work were initially both ecology (especially after it was established that after the thawing of frozen soils in certain areas, the radon emanation increased tens of times) and geological exploration. Purpose of the article. Modern evaluation of organizational and technical methods for detecting radon activity of identified tectonic faults of the earth's crust in the permafrost zone. Conclusions and results. The authors propose a refinement of the existing methodology for detecting both faults themselves in the permafrost zone and evaluating their tectonic activity. Additionally, for confident sorting of radon anomalies and identifying the parameters of fault zones necessary to define their tectonic activity, it is recommended to introduce a special parameter – a coefficient for frozen soils that characterizes the permeability of the medium (the degree of radon emanation) after permafrost thawing. A modern analysis of previously completed works allowed us to suggest focusing further efforts on conducting radonometry in range zones of permafrost soil, studying the existing instrumentation and technical base for solving target problems and finding ways to improve it.