MOSCOW, 3 August 2007 — In a perilous project mixing science, exploration and the scramble for potential oil and gas fields, crews of two Russian mini-submarines were yesterday engaged in what Russian authorities called the first dive to the ocean floor at Earth’s northernmost point.
The submarines returned safely from their risky voyage descending more than 4 km beneath the ice to the Arctic Ocean floor of the North Pole, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.
The vice president of the Federation of Polar Explorers, Vladimir Strugatsky, said the Mir-1 has resurfaced safely after spending eight hours and 40 minutes under water, according to the news agency. More than an hour later, Strugatsky said the sister sub, the Mir-2, had also resurfaced successfully.
Expedition organizers said the greatest risk facing the six crew members, three on each vessel, was being trapped under the ice and running out of air. Each sub had a 72-hour air supply.
Strugatsky said the Mir-1 spent about 40 minutes near the surface before it found a patch of sea surface free of ice, the ITAR-Tass said.
“That was difficult,” expedition leader Artur Chilingarov, who was aboard the Mir-1, told a cheering crowd of colleagues who welcomed the crew with a loud “hurrah!” after the mini-sub was raised to the Akademik Fyodorov research ship. The crew of the Mir-1 dropped a titanium capsule containing the nation’s flag on the bottom, symbolically claiming almost half of the planet’s northern polar region for Moscow.
“It was so good down there,” Chilingarov, 68, a famed polar scientist, said after coming back. “If someone else goes down there in 100 or 1,000 years, he will see our Russian flag.”
The Mir-2’s crew included Michael McDowell, an Australian described by the ITAR-Tass news agency as a polar explorer, and Frederik Paulsen, a Swedish pharmaceuticals millionaire described as a co-sponsor of the dive.
Russian scientists were to map part of the Lomonosov Ridge, a 1,995-km underwater mountain range that crosses the polar region. The ridge was discovered by the Soviets in 1948 and named after a famed 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 UN rejected Moscow’s application, citing lack of evidence, but Russia is set to resubmit it in 2009.
If recognized, the claim would give Russia control of more than 1.2 million square kilometers, 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. The voyage has some scientific goals, including studies of the climate, geology and biology of the polar region. But its chief aim appears to be to advance Russia’s political and economic influence by strengthening its legal claims to the Arctic.
Sergey Lavrov, the Russian 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,” Lavrov said in televised remarks. He said, though, that the issue of which nation holds what portion of the polar region “will be resolved in strict compliance with international law.”
The US Senate has not yet ratified US accession to the Law of the Sea, which would give Washington a seat on the panel that would consider and eventually rule on the Russian claim. A spokeswoman for the US State Department said the Bush administration would continue to press hard for ratification in order to give the United States a voice on the commission.
