Russian mini-subs dive to Arctic seabed to make symbolic claim on energy reserves

~ Thursday's dive was part serious scientific expedition and part political theater.

MOSCOW -- Two small Russian submarines completed a risky voyage deep below the North Pole Thursday, planting their country's flag in a titanium capsule on the Arctic Ocean floor to symbolically claim what could be vast energy reserves beneath the seabed.

The subs dove some 2 1/2 miles to the Arctic shelf, where they collected geologic and water samples and dropped the yard-long canister. After spending most of the day below water, they surfaced near the pole, guided from the murky depths by four radio beacons on the perimeter of a football field-sized hole cut in the thick Arctic pack ice.

"It was so good down there," expedition leader Artur Chilingarov, 68, a famed polar scientist, said after coming back, according to the state-owned ITAR-Tass news service. "If someone else goes down there in 100 or 1,000 years, he will see our Russian flag."

Warming global temperatures have made the region, a frozen terra incognita for most of human history, increasingly open to shipping and energy exploration.

Thursday's dive was part serious scientific expedition and part political theater. But it could mark the start of a fierce legal scramble for control of the seabed among nations that border the Arctic, including Russia, the United States, Canada, Norway and Denmark, through its territory Greenland.

Canada dismissed the flag-planting as empty showmanship, and the United States said Russia's move had no legal importance regardless of whether it planted "a metal flag, a rubber flag or a bedsheet."

Chilingarov, who surfaced to cheers from colleagues aboard the polar research vessel Akademik Fyodorov, spent eight hours and 40 minutes submerged with his two crew mates, ITAR-Tass said, with the last 40 minutes used to find the break in the ice. The second sub and its three-member crew, including a Swede and an Australian, surfaced more than an hour after the first, after about 9 1/2 hours under the ice.

Expedition organizers said the greatest risk was being trapped under the ice and running out of air. Each of the subs, which had 72-hour air supplies, spent about 40 minutes on the sea floor, said Sergei Balyasnikov, a spokesman for Russia's Institute of the Arctic and Antarctic which organized the expedition. He said the crews were in good physical condition.

The expedition received intense coverage in the media here. While some Russians were blase, others expressed pride.

"Russia is a great power which needs resources, territories and the prospect of its development determines its action," Muscovite Yevgeny Gaziyev said.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said during a visit to Manila, Philippines, that the expedition should substantiate Russia's claim that the Eurasian continental shelf, which is under its jurisdiction, extends to the North Pole.

"I think this expedition will supply additional scientific evidence for our aspirations," Lavrov said in televised remarks. He added that the issue of which nation what portion of the polar region "will be resolved in strict compliance with international law."

A U.S. State Department spokesman, Tom Casey, said that the Russian government was entitled to submit its claim but he dismissed the significance of planting a flag in the North Pole seabed.

"I'm not sure whether they put a metal flag, a rubber flag or a bedsheet on the ocean floor," he said. "Either way it doesn't have any legal standing."

Peter Mackay, Canada's minister of foreign affairs, dismissed the voyage to the Arctic floor as "just a show."

"Look, this isn't the 15th century," he said, according to the Web site of Canadian Television. "You can't go around the world and just plant flags and say 'We're claiming this territory."'

Canada's own claims to the Arctic, he said, were "well-established."

"This is posturing," he said. "They're fooling themselves if they think dropping a flag on the ocean floor is going to change anything."

Chilingarov told colleagues on the surface that his craft, the Mir-1, had reached the seabed about 21/2 hours after beginning his drive.

"The landing was smooth, the yellowish ground is around us, no sea dwellers are seen," he said, according to the ITAR-Tass news agency. Mir-2 reached the bottom about a half-hour later.

The subs and their three-member crews each spent about an hour in the murky depths. They had planned to conduct a study of the water chemistry, biology and geology near the seabed at the pole, according to Russia's Institute of the Arctic and Antarctic, which organized the expedition.

Russian researchers also 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 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 U.N. rejected Moscow's claim, citing a lack of evidence, but Russia is set to resubmit it in 2009.

If recognized, 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.

Chilingarov became a hero of the Soviet Union in the 1980s after successfully leading an expedition aboard a research vessel that was trapped for a time in Antarctic sea ice. He is a deputy speaker of the Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament.

The Mir-1 reached a depth of 13,980 feet Thursday, Tass reported. The Mir-2 went deeper, to 14,144 feet below the surface.

The deepest dive on record, according to several sources, was by the bathyscaphe Trieste, which in January 1960 descended 35,810 feet into the Mariana Trench in the Pacific.