Russian Scientists Honored For Exploration Of Arctic Seabed

Move over, polar bears. The standard view of Arctic life is changing after a team led by Russian scientists plunged through pack ice around the North Pole last August and descended more than two miles through pitch darkness to the ocean bottom. They accomplished the historic first in twin submersibles.

Hovering above the ooze, lights blazing, the explorers found a previously hidden world of Arctic life, including wiggling fish with long tails, fields of burrowing sea anemones and shrimp-like crustaceans that danced beneath the bright lights.

“A world that had forever lain in complete darkness” is how the team described the eerie panorama.

The team recently submitted an 18-page report on the dive to the Explorers Club, which honored the expedition’s chief scientist on Saturday night in New York.

The findings help discredit the old view of the deep ocean as a biological desert. Instead, though dark and frigid, it turns out to seethe with life, even miles beneath the pole’s frozen wastelands.

The team dived in Moscow’s twin submersibles. The size of small trucks, both are named Mir, Russian for peace.

Each Mir has a superstrong personnel sphere that protects a pilot and two observers, and each sphere has tiny portholes designed to withstand the crushing pressures of the deep sea so occupants can peer out. Typically, a dive into the abyss is an all-day affair, requiring hours to and from the bottom.

The divers included Anatoly M. Sagalevitch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. A short man with large glasses and grayish white hair, he runs the Mirs, piloted the lead one and was the expedition’s chief scientist.

On Aug. 2, the two Mirs were lowered through a natural hole in the ice pack near the North Pole and headed for the bottom.

Small crustaceans flitted through the first Mir’s lights as the submersible reached the seabed, the report said. The sediment was so fine that the craft had to proceed with great care, its thruster controls requiring “the finest of touches,” to avoid stirring up clouds of blinding mud.

The explorers in the second Mir saw a few slowly undulating fish lazing over the ancient sediments before the submersible’s noise and bright lights sent them darting away. The report said the submersible used its manipulator arm to scoop some of the seabed muck and the small anemones that burrowed there, one or two per square meter.

The dive stirred not only sediment but also controversy, because Moscow said afterward that the feat had strengthened its claims to nearly half the Arctic seabed. It also drew charges from Alfred S. McLaren, a retired Navy submariner, who accused the Russian team of failing to credit his early development of the polar dive plan.

The Russians acknowledged that Dr. McLaren had a central role in the dive’s origins but said he contributed nothing to its substantive planning and logistics.

In an interview, Dr. McLaren said he bore no hard feelings for the Mir team. And he went to the Explorers Club annual dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria, where Dr. Sagalevitch was honored with an award given annually to “an individual who has made exceptional contributions to underwater exploration.”

In its report, the polar team said its successful dive marked one of the last geographically significant “firsts” for humans on Earth. The collected data, the report added, “may prove useful as an environmental baseline by which to measure future changes in the polar abyss.”

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