In 1930, a sci­en­tif­ic lab­o­ra­to­ry was opened in Igar­ka, and in 1931, the Igar­ka Sci­en­tif­ic Research Per­mafrost Sta­tion (INIMS) of the Per­mafrost Insti­tute of the Siber­ian Branch of the USSR Acad­e­my of Sci­ences was opened. It has sur­vived in Igar­ka to this day, although it was renamed the Igar­ka Geocry­olog­i­cal Lab­o­ra­to­ry.

The INIMS under­ground lab­o­ra­to­ry was devel­oped for the pur­pose of study­ing per­mafrost soils. In order to study their phys­i­cal and mechan­i­cal prop­er­ties and the bear­ing capac­i­ty of soils, a con­stant neg­a­tive tem­per­a­ture was need­ed for a num­ber of years. For this pur­pose, an under­ground work­ing was cre­at­ed, where instru­ments were installed and sci­en­tif­ic exper­i­ments and obser­va­tions were car­ried out.

Along with con­duct­ing long-term exper­i­ments, research staff were engaged in dis­sem­i­nat­ing knowl­edge about the per­mafrost soils on which the city was built, and about the need for the pop­u­la­tion of Igar­ka to treat them with care.

In 1965, a per­mafrost muse­um was cre­at­ed in one of the under­ground cham­bers. The idea of ​​cre­at­ing such a muse­um was expressed by Mikhail Ivanovich Sum­gin, the founder of Sovi­et per­mafrost sci­ence, the author of numer­ous sci­en­tif­ic works, the first text­book for stu­dents of the per­mafrost depart­ment of Moscow State Uni­ver­si­ty, and the head of the Com­mis­sion (lat­er the Com­mit­tee) on per­mafrost at the USSR Acad­e­my of Sci­ences. For the first time in his work “Per­mafrost of Soil with­in the USSR,” he sum­ma­rized infor­ma­tion on the dis­tri­b­u­tion and caus­es of per­mafrost, and defined the tasks of per­mafrost sci­ence as an inde­pen­dent sci­ence. In the same work, he put for­ward the idea of ​​cre­at­ing a muse­um in per­mafrost designed to last for cen­turies. Sum­gin always believed that only an under­ground muse­um in per­mafrost could pre­serve exist­ing forms of ani­mals and plants for cen­turies.