Moscow, Aug. 2 (Reuters): Russian explorers dived deep below the North Pole in a submersible today and planted a national flag on the seabed to stake a symbolic claim to the energy riches of the Arctic.

A mechanical arm dropped a specially made rust-proof titanium flag onto the Arctic seabed at a depth of 4,261 metres , Itar-Tass news agency quoted expedition officials as saying. Russia wants to extend right up to the North Pole the territory it controls in the Arctic, believed to hold vast reserves of untapped oil and natural gas.

However, Canada mocked Russia’s ambitions and said the expedition was nothing more than a show.

“This isn’t the 15th century. You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say: ‘We’re claiming this territory’,” Canadian foreign minister Peter MacKay said.

Under international law, the five states with territory inside the Arctic Circle — Canada, Norway, Russia, the US and Denmark via its control of Greenland — have a 320 km economic zone around the north of their coastline.

Russia is claiming a larger slice extending as far as the pole because, Moscow says, the Arctic seabed and Siberia are linked by one continental shelf. “Then Russia can give foundation to its claim to more than a million square kilometres of the oceanic shelf,” said a newsreader for Russia’s state news channel Vesti-24.

“It was a soft landing,” Tass quoted expedition leader Artur Chilingarov as saying from on board one of the submersibles.

The rest of the expedition team, floating on a support vessel between the giant ice sheets of the Arctic, broke into applause when news came through the mission had been completed.