Russia Plants Underwater Flag, Claims Arctic Seafloor

Richard A. Lovett
for National Geographic News

August 3, 2007

Russia has laid claim to the seafloor at the North Pole, planting its national flag underwater in the hopes of securing the Arctic's potential motherlode of natural resources.

In an unprecedented dive beneath the ice, two three-person submersibles descended 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) to the bottom, where one symbolically dropped a titanium capsule containing a Russian flag.

Nobody knows for sure what resources lie beneath the Arctic Ocean, but oil and gas are among the greatest possible interests.

And with global warming causing the icepack to shrink, offshore drilling in the Arctic might prove to be the last great oil frontier (related: "As Arctic Ice Melts, Rush Is on for Shipping Lanes, More" [February 25, 2005]).

The Russian claim to the region, made Thursday, is based on international law that sets a 200-mile (322-kilometer) territorial limit stretching from the coast into open waters. This limit can be expanded if a country's continental shelf extends further out to sea.

Since 2001 Russian officials have been arguing that an undersea formation called the Lomonosov Ridge is part of Siberia's shelf, and that the country is therefore entitled to sole rights to the ridge and the nearby seabed.

Still, the Russians acknowledge that planting the flag was a purely symbolic act.

"It means nothing" from a legal standpoint, Viktor Posyolov, deputy director of Russia's Institute of World Ocean Geology and Mineral Resources, told the Associated Press several days before the dive.

And Ted McDorman, a law professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, told National Geographic News that "what the Russians have done is good politics, but it doesn't affect the legal situation one way or the other."

Whose Ridge?

The 1,200-mile-long (2,000-kilometer-long) Lomonosov Ridge rises more than 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) above the seabed and runs all the way from Siberia to North America (download a printable map of the Arctic Ocean).

Because the ridge links Canada to Russia, the Canadians have disputed Russia's claim to the underwater turf.

So has Denmark, which claims that the ridge is actually part of Greenland.

Normally the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf makes the final decision on continental margins.

But the commission isn't designed to settle conflicting claims, the University of Victoria's McDorman said.

"It is unlikely that the commission would have jurisdiction to deal with this," he said, "which would mean that it would fall to negotiation between the Russians, the Canadians, and the Danes."

Ownership of the seabed ultimately depends on its geology—"in simplistic terms, whether it is continental in nature," McDorman said.

Also, he noted, "there are ridges throughout the Arctic Ocean, and there have always been questions whether you can ride the ridge into the ocean as far as it goes."

Mini-Sub Science

International quibbles aside, ocean explorers are excited about the science the Russian mini-subs may have accomplished on the deep-ocean floor.

Diving beneath the ice poses unusual difficulties, said Christina Reed, a Seattle-based marine scientist and journalist who dived in one of the subs in the Atlantic in 2003.

When the mini-subs usually complete a dive, they simply ascend to the surface and let the mother ship come to them, Reed said.

Beneath the Arctic ice, however, the subs must come up through the same hole through which they descended.

"GPS [global position system] doesn't work underwater," Reed said. "So they have to use transponders [radios] to locate themselves."

And since the subs were diving for hours under the Arctic ice, Reed said, the Russian teams likely would have been exploring the remote deep-water world.

At that depth the seabed isn't exactly teeming with life, but neither is it totally barren. Reed compares it to a terrestrial desert, where life is sparse but interesting.

"This is very exciting," she said. "Regardless of what they find, it's making history."

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