## 1 Introduction  
Many works [1; 2; 3; 4; 5; 6; 7; 8] (see also numerous references therein) are devoted to the propagation of sound signals in the Arctic Ocean. One review [1] of the current state of research indicates that in the post-war period until the early 1990s, acoustic research was mainly of a military orientation, associated with the navigation and detection of nuclear sub-marines. Since the 1990s, the attention of researchers has switched to the study of climatic changes in the Arctic due to the rapidly deteriorating state of the ice cover (the extent and thickness of sea ice have sharply decreased over the past 50 years), due to an increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere [2; 3; 4]. Acoustic tomography of the ocean water column has been developed [5; 6], which makes it possible, by means of remote sensing of the water masses of the Arctic basin, to study their temperature dynamics in a year-round mode (acoustic thermometry) [7; 8]. Both in the case of military and thermometry purposes, experimental and theoretical studies were carried out for long-distance routes (2000-2700 km) of the central part of the deep Arctic Ocean [1; 7; 8], namely, experiments TAP, 1994; ACOUS, 1998-1999; and CAATEX, 2019-2020. They pursued the aim of identifying the features of the propagation of ultra-low frequency signals (tens of hertz) in the presence of ice cover and stratification (as a rule, in the form of a near-surface sound channel), characteristic of the central part of the Arctic basin. As a result, it became possible to remotely register the temperature rise in the Arctic using acoustic methods, to track the movement of large water masses flowing from the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean to the Arctic Ocean and their transformation, to develop multipurpose acoustic systems with inclusion in the integrated observing system for the Arctic region [1; 7]. However, the features of the sound fields formed on the long paths of the deep part of the Arctic Ocean, which, owing to the above-mentioned works, have been well studied, are very different from the features of sound propagation in the shallow zones (with typical depths up to 100 m) of the Arctic basin shelf. Here, from the acoustical point of view, of greater interest is not the study of changes in stratification and ice cover (which may not exist at all, for example, in August-September), but the influence of the inhomogeneous bottom structure. In shallow seas, as is known, it is the nature of the bottom that dominates the propagation of sound signals. The present work refers specifically to the study of the features of low-frequency sound signal propagation in the conditions of the shallow seas of the Arctic shelf. The importance of such studies is due to the solution of the problems of prospecting and developing mineral deposits and related environmental issues, particularly the impact of anthropogenic signals and noise on marine mammals living in the shallow seas of the shelf. From open sources, only a few works are known, devoted to the propagation of acoustic signals in the shallow Arctic seas adjacent to the land. Thus, in articles [9; 10], in a deterministic formulation, the propagation of low-frequency sound (hundreds of hertz) for several short paths (5 km long) of the Kara Sea shelf with an inhomogeneous bottom is considered. From an acoustic point of view, sound propagation in the Arctic shelf waters occurs under conditions of a shallow waveguide with a nearly uniform distribution of sound velocity over depth and very diverse properties of bottom sediments. Such conditions, as indicated above, differ significantly from the conditions of signal propagation in the waveguide of the central Arctic (the effect of the bottom there is of little significance, and if taken into account, then fragmentarily and phenomenologically [7; 8], its actual parameters are unknown).