On the eve of this holiday, Larisa Antonova, chief specialist at the Museum of the Institute of Oceanology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, explains how the Russian Federation flag was planted at the North Pole.

On August 2, 2007, during the high-latitude Arctic expedition "Arktika-2007", the manned submersibles Mir-1 and Mir-2 for the first time in history dived to the geographic point of the North Pole.

Having descended to a depth of more than 4,261 meters to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, the Mir-1 crew used a mechanical manipulator to plant the Russian flag on the seabed—a meter-long tricolor made of corrosion-resistant titanium alloy, manufactured in Kaliningrad.

This symbolic gesture, accompanied by the placement of a capsule containing a message for posterity and the collection of soil samples, was intended to demonstrate the country's scientific potential and bolster Russia's geological arguments for the Arctic shelf's sovereignty. The dive was further complicated by the fact that  the ascent from a depth of 4 km had to be made through an opening in the ice.