Russian subs make test dive on way to NPole

Moscow, July 29: Two Russian deep-sea submersibles made a test dive in polar waters today ahead of a mission to be the first to reach the seabed under the North Pole, Itar-Tass news agency said.

Tass said it took an hour for Mir-1 and Mir-2, each carrying one pilot, to reach the seabed at a depth of 1,311 metres 47 nautical miles north of Russia's northernmost archipelago, Franz Josef Land in the Barents Sea.

They were expected to practise manoeuvres and collect samples before surfacing within a couple of hours.

As the Arctic icecap thins as a result of global warming, a race is looming to claim ownership of the rich energy resources under the North Pole.

The Russian mission involves a nuclear-powered icebreaker smashing through the ice to clear a path to the Pole for the command ship Akademik Fedorov. This will launch the submersibles to scoop samples from the seabed for research.

The mission will also plant a flag on the seabed under the Pole to symbolically claim the territory for Russia.

Soviet and US nuclear submarines have often travelled under the polar icecap, but no one has so far reached the seabed under the Pole, where depths exceed 4,000 metres.

''These test dives were not planned, but we decided to make them to double-check everything,'' Tass quoted the head of the mission, Artur Chelingarov, as saying on board the Akademik Fedorov.

''There is a hard and risky job to be done in the next few days to reach the seabed of the toughest ocean in the world at a point no one has been able to reach so far,'' he added.

Chelingarov did not say when exactly Mir-1 and Mir-2 would start their main mission, several hundred miles further north.

The craft are capable of working at depths down to 6,000 metres.

International law states the five countries with territory inside the Arctic Circle - Russia, the United States, Canada, Norway and Denmark through its control of Greenland - can claim only a 200-mile economic zone around their coastlines.

But since 2001, Russia has claimed a larger slice extending as far as the North Pole, arguing that the Arctic seabed and Siberia are on the same continental shelf.

Reuters>