Fighting over ownership of the Arctic has taken a strange turn, with an American submariner claiming in today’s New York Times that his work was vital to Russia’s ‘flag on the pole’ stunt last August.

You may remember the Russian expedition that placed a titanium flag on the sea floor underneath the North Pole. This triggered a whole hailstorm of interest in a UN convention that will allow countries to extend their national boundaries beyond current limits and claim thousands of kilometers of the sea floor (see Nature coverage links below).

Now Alfred McLaren, a retired US Navy submariner, says he developed a polar dive plan and shared it with the Russians, drawing on federal polar data including ice thickness water depth and salinity. McLaren told the Times the Russian link came through his work with a polar tour company that planned to run tourist trips to the North Pole sea floor.

“I wrote the procedures for the dive,” he tells the paper.

However, the Russians are having less than none of it: “Talk is cheap. But real operation, this is different,” says Anatoly Sagalevitch, the expedition’s chief scientist.

The full article is well worth a read.

Nature coverage of the issue

Russia at forefront of Arctic land-grab, Aug 2007

News feature: Geology: The next land rush, Jan 2008

Arctic mapping redraws borders, Feb 2008

Image: North Pole / Image by Allen Lunsford, NASA GSFC Direct Readout Laboratory; Data courtesy Tromso receiving station, Svalbard, Norway (via NASA Visible Earth)