Into the deep

摘要

ON 2 AUGUST 2007, bright light shone on the ocean floor beneath the North Pole for the first time, as a van-sized submarine settled on the seabed. Inside, pilot Anatoly Sagalevich deployed a mechanical arm to erect a Russian flag. That act stirred up more than the yellow-tinged polar sediments. "This isn't the 15th century: you can't go around the world and just plant flags and say we're claiming this territory," said Canada's foreign minister, Peter MacKay. Russia countered that the flag-planting was merely to celebrate their achievement - like taking a flag to the moon. "The goal of this expedition is not to stake out Russia's rights, but to prove that our [continental] shelf stretches up to the North Pole," said Russia's foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov. In 2015, Russia used data from the expedition to support a claim to seabed resources in 1.3 million square kilometres around the pole.