Russia claims North Pole seabed

Friday, August 03, 2007


Russian explorers dived deep below the North Pole in two submersibles
yesterday 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 on
to the Arctic seabed at a depth of 4,261 meters.

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," said Foreign Minister Peter MacKay.
"You can't go around the world and just plant flags and say `We're
claiming this territory'."

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 kilometer 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 kilometres of the oceanic shelf," said a newsreader for
Russia's state news channel Vesti-24, which made the expedition its
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," said Chilingarov, 67, a veteran
Arctic explorer and parliament deputy for the pro-Kremlin party. "No
creatures of the deep are visible."

The first submarine resurfaced after spending eight hours and 40
minutes under water. The second resurfaced an hour later.

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 said in Manila, where he was attending a regional security
conference.

The 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 US nuclear submarines have often travelled under the polar
icecap, but no one had reached the seabed under the Pole, where depths
exceed 4,000 meters. REUTERS