I always thought the whole flag planting thing was a myth. Apparently not:
MOSCOW (AP) -- 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 sea bed among nations that border the Arctic, including Russia, the U.S., Canada, Norway and Denmark, through its territory Greenland.
Canada dismissed the flag-planting as empty showmanship, and the U.S. said Russia's move had no legal importance regardless of whether it planted "a metal flag, a rubber flag or a bedsheet."
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