http://www.sptimes.ru/index.php?action_id=2&story_id=22515
Sub Plants Flag Under North Pole
By Guy Faulconbridge
Reuters
Reuters Television / Reuters
Russian miniature submarines are seen underwater in the Arctic Ocean in
this screen capture from a broadcast on Thursday.
MOSCOW - Russian explorers dived deep below the North Pole in a submersible on
Thursday and planted a national flag on the seabed to stake a symbolic claim to
the energy riches of the Arctic.
A mechanical arm dropped a specially made rust-proof titanium flag onto the
Arctic seabed at a depth of 4,261 meters (13,980 ft), Itar-Tass news agency
quoted expedition officials as saying.
Russia wants to extend right up to the North Pole the territory it controls in
the Arctic, believed to hold vast reserves of untapped oil and natural gas.
But Canada mocked Russia's ambitions and said the expedition was nothing more
than a show.
"This isn't the 15th century. You can't go around the world and just plant
flags and say 'We're claiming this territory'," Canadian Foreign Minister Peter
MacKay told CTV television.
Under international law, the five states with territory inside the Arctic
Circle - Canada, Norway, Russia, the United States and Denmark via its control
of Greenland - have a 320 km economic zone around the north of their coastline.
Russia is claiming a larger slice extending as far as the pole because, Moscow
says, the Arctic seabed and Siberia are linked by one continental shelf.
"Then Russia can give foundation to its claim to more than a million square
kilometers of the oceanic shelf," said a newsreader for Russia's state news
channel Vesti-24, which made the expedition their top news story.
"It was a soft landing," Tass quoted expedition leader Artur Chilingarov as
saying from on board one of the submersibles.
The rest of the expedition team, floating on a support vessel between the giant
ice sheets of the Arctic, broke into applause when news came through the
mission had been completed.
"There is yellowish gravel down here. No creatures of the deep are visible,"
said Chilingarov, 67, a veteran Arctic explorer and parliament deputy for the
pro-Kremlin party.
Expedition leaders have said their main worry is to resurface at the ice hole
where they dived as the mini-submersibles are not strong enough to break
through the North Pole's deep ice cap.
One of the aims of the expedition is to allow oceanographers to study the
seabed and establish that Russia and the North Pole are part of the same shelf.
"The aim of this expedition is not to stake Russia's claim but to show that our
shelf reaches to the North Pole," Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters
in Manila, where he is attending a regional security conference.
The Mir-1 submersible reached the seabed at 1208 Moscow time.
A second Russian submersible, manned by Swedish businessman Frederik Paulsen
and Australian adventurer Mike McDowell, reached the seabed 27 minutes later.
It reached a depth of 4,302 meters.
Soviet and U.S. nuclear submarines have often traveled under the polar icecap,
but no one had reached the seabed under the Pole, where depths exceed 4,000
meters.
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