Russian sub stakes claim on North Pole

MOSCOW — Two Russian minisubmarines returned safely to the surface at the North Pole on Thursday after diving to the sea bottom to plant a Russian flag and collect geological samples.

"It was so lovely down there," Artur Chilingarov, a prominent polar explorer who descended in the first minisub, told Russian media after the dive. "If a hundred or a thousand years from now someone goes down to where we were, they will see the Russian flag," he added, according to the Russian news agency Itar-Tass.

The expedition was part of an effort to bolster Russian claims to about 460,000 square miles of sea floor believed to hold lucrative deposits of oil and natural gas. Under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, Russia's claim depends not on dropping the Russian flag, but on proving that its continental shelf extends to the pole.

While extracting resources from the Arctic Ocean floor faces huge technical challenges, global warming is reducing the size of the polar ice cap and boosting the potential for such activities. The part of the Arctic Ocean claimed by Russia could hold oil and natural-gas deposits equal to about 25 percent of the world's current reserves, the Russian news agency RIA Novosti said.

Video footage taken before the dive showed a stiff Russian flag and stand made of rust-proof titanium attached to the outside of one of the minisubs. A robotic arm was used to place it on the seabed, along with a capsule containing a message to future generations. The second minisub gathered geological samples.

"The aim of this expedition is not to stake Russia's claim, but to prove that our shelf extends to the North Pole," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Thursday. The density of the seabed samples retrieved by the mission will help show whether the region is part of Russia's continental shelf, Itar-Tass said. The flag's planting drew a sharp critique Thursday from Canada, which also has extensive claims in the Arctic Ocean. "This isn't the 15th century," Canadian Foreign Minister Peter MacKay told CTV television. "You can't go around the world and just plant flags and say, 'We're claiming this territory.' "

U.S. State Department spokesman Tom Casey said: "I'm not sure of whether they've put a metal flag, a rubber flag or a bed sheet on the ocean floor. Either way, it doesn't have any legal standing or effect on this claim."

Under international law, the five countries with coastal territories inside the Arctic Circle — Russia, the United States, Canada, Norway and Denmark — can claim an economic zone extending 200 miles into the Arctic Ocean from their coasts, regardless of the structure of the continental shelf.