Russia claims polar seabed
TWO Russian mini-submarines completed a hazardous voyage two and a half miles to the floor of the Arctic Ocean yesterday in the Kremlin’s attempt to claim the energy wealth in the region.
After spending most of yesterday underwater, the two subs surfaced near the North Pole, guided to a football pitch-sized hole cut in the Arctic ice by the nuclear powered icebreaker Rossiya.
“It was difficult,” said Artur Chilingarov, the leader of the expedition, in remarks reported by the state-owned ITAR-Tass news service. He and two crew spent eight hours and 40 minutes submerged, the news service said, the last 40 minutes hunting for the break in the ice.
Expedition organisers said the greatest risk facing the six crew members, three aboard each vessel, was getting trapped under the ice and running out of air. Each sub had a 72-hour supply.
The second sub and its crew, including a Swede and an Australian, surfaced more than an hour after the first after spending about nine and half hours under the ice.
Mr Chilingarov told cheering colleagues aboard Akademik Fyodorov, a polar research vessel that he was proud to have helped plant a titanium capsule containing a Russian flag on the North Pole seabed.
“It was so good down there,” Mr Chilingarov, 68, said. “If someone else goes down there in 100 or 1,000 years, he will see our Russian flag.”
Part serious scientific expedition and part political theatre, yesterday’s dives could mark the start of a scramble among nations that border the Arctic for control of the seabed in the northern polar waters.
Warming global temperatures have made the region, a frozen terra incognita for most of history, increasingly open to shipping and energy exploration.
Organisers said the dive was the first to the sea floor at Earth’s northernmost point.
“Russia is a great power which needs resources, territories - and the prospect of its development determines its action,” Yevgeny Gaziyev, a Muscovite, said.
Sergey Lavrov, the foreign minister said during a visit to Manila that the expedition should substantiate Russia’s claim that the Eurasian continental shelf extends to the North Pole.
“I think this expedition will supply additional scientific evidence for our aspirations,” Mr Lavrov said.
Russian researchers planned to use the dive to help map the Lomonosov Ridge, a 1,240-mile underwater mountain range that crosses the polar region. The ridge was discovered by the Soviet Union in 1948 and named after an 18th-century Russian scientist, Mikhail Lomonosov.
In December 2001, Moscow claimed that the ridge was an extension of the Eurasian continent, and therefore part of Russia’s continental shelf under international law. The United Nations rejected Moscow’s claim but Russia is set to resubmit it in 2009.
If recognised, the claim would give Russia control of more than 460,000 square miles, representing almost half of the Arctic seabed. Little is known about the ocean floor near the pole, but by some estimates it could contain vast oil and gas deposits. CANADA SAYS IT’S ALL A PUBLICITY STUNT
CANADA yesterday mocked Russia’s Arctic claim as a publicity ploy and vowed to assert sovereignty over Canadian lands and waterways in the frozen wilderness.
“This isn’t the 15th century,” the 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’. We’re not at all concerned about this mission; basically it’s just a show by Russia.”
One of only five nations with territory inside the Arctic Circle, Canada’s conservative government in Ottawa announced last month it is to build eight patrol ships to guard its interests in the icy region, believed to contain huge untapped oil and gas reserves.
Other nations with territory inside the Arctic Circle include Norway, Russia, the United States and Denmark via its control of Greenland.
