Abstract
The area of the Continental Shelf of the World Ocean and closed seas, which is promising for oil and gas, covers 20 Mkm2, but nowadays it’s developed only up to 1 Mkm2. It is known that the remaining larger part is highly perspective. There are colossal volumes of oil and gas in entrails of Russian shelf. About 90 % of shelf’s area are perspective for hydrocarbon production – this is 2/3 of envisaging further development stocks on the land. Currently there are 9 large open fields within the shelf of the Russian waters in the Caspian Sea, but only one is equipped – the Yuri Korchagin field. In the next 10 y has been planned to equip four more fields, to build 1,500 km of undersea trunk pipeline. Caspian Sea can freeze – there is an ice season – usually from November to March, and in freezing seas the main danger for the undersea pipeline are the keels of hummocky formations. Underwater pipelines built in the Russian Federation (RF) and Kazakhstan sectors of the North Caspian Sea lay on the ground without embedment. As the result, in the winter seasons of 2012- 2013 subduction and layering of ice, which thickness reached several tens of cm, led to the accident at the oil field "Kashagan" in the Kazakh sector of the North Caspian Sea. The four threads of the pipe, laying on the seabed without embedment, were damaged by ice. The same phenomenon happened in the Korchagin oilfield and caused not only economic losses, but also brought environmental damage to the Caspian Sea ecosystem. To study the influence of ice formations and evaluation of the interaction of marine pipelines with slack soils is a necessary condition for designing, constructing and operation on the shelf sea infrastructure (Klemeš, 2015).
