"Do you have a flag?"
Posted on 08/02/2007 6:52:18 AM PDT by nuconvert
Russian sub plants flag under North Pole
By Guy Faulconbridge
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 (200 mile) 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.
ARCTIC ADVENTURE
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 (4:08 a.m. EDT).
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 (13,100 feet).
(Additional reporting by Christian Lowe in Moscow and David Ljunggren in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada)
The commies can take the North Pole from us when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.
My really, really freezing-cold dead hands... ;)
Fletcher J
Shouldn’t Santa have a say in this?
Hey nutso environmentalists please go the North Pole and protest the potential disaster to the polar bears and other NP animals. The Russians are very easy people to deal with, they absolutely love American liberals and will be sincerely touched by your concern. Please feel free to stay for a while - possibly forever. Oh, and while you are there, please say hello to Santa for me.
ROFL!
Mars too!
No oil.
Pssssst: Dilithium crystals.
No oil.
No oil, but plenty of He3, once we fgure out how to fuse it
http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/neep602/lecture33.html
Ain't that the truth! It would be less hassle to just buy the Arctic oil from the Russians. Although a nice touch would be for the Russians to contract Halliburton in the project -- just to piss the liberals off.
And it could get much uglier! Soon canada will be up there with their shiny new ships, demanding theirs. THEN you’ll see some action - the polar bears will be getting this on video, it will be so exciting. If there’s a betting pool, I’ll put $20. on Santa, though: that flying sleigh is going to be hard to beat. And he elves!!
Got it covered.
Uh, to go, I guess.
And where would you be going?
Um, Mars?
Japs, not ruskies.
Well, since the Russians just now reached the North Pole and are the first people ever to go there, isn’t it theirs?
I mean, noone else has ever arrived there before today have they?
Finders keepers and all that?
(Eskimos? What Eskimos?)
I bet McDs has enough preservatives to make it to Mars!
if the other arctic nations had a pair of cajones between them, they’d issue a summons to putin for littering...
go UN make us proud, defend your LOST treaty by squashing this russian act with inPUTINity...
teeman
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.