Expeditions

A Russian expedition led by a nuclear-powered icebreaker reached the North Pole on Wednesday on a mission to send two mini-submarines to the polar seabed. The expedition, which would be the first to reach the polar sea bottom 2.6 miles below the Arctic Ocean surface, is seen as part of an effort to bolster Russian claims to about 460,000 square miles of sea floor believed to hold lucrative deposits of oil and natural gas.

Eight Israelis and Palestinians left on an expedition to climb an unnamed, unconquered mountain in Antarctica, vowing to show they can work together under difficult conditions. The two yachts carrying the six men and two women of the "Breaking the Ice" expedition sailed from Puerto Williams, a Chilean naval base. "I think we are setting a very good example on how different people can live and cooperate together," leader Heskel Nathaniel said as the expedition sailed off in good weather.

As warm salt water lapped against his legs, Chuck Baxter took delight in the creatures clinging to rocks and skittering around the tidal shallows. His sunburned hands dipped beneath the shimmering surface for a closer examination of starfish, crabs and sponges forming a palette of red, orange, yellow and brown.

Flying high in a helicopter over a shimmering Arabian desert, Nicholas Clapp began to wonder whether he wasn't truly crazy after all. Sprawling beneath him was the Rub' al Khali, or Empty Quarter--an endless expanse of forbidding isolation known for its majestic dunes that rise up 60 stories from the desert floor like great ocher-colored waves of rolling sand.

If you're hunting for signs of travelers lost in uncharted space, what better place to look than the land of flying saucers? That's where anthropologist Jerry Freeman of Pearblossom found himself when he set off to follow the trail of the Lost '49ers--the wagon train that ended up in the desert instead of the gold fields when it made a wrong turn about 150 years ago.

Twelve days after the first Christmas, three magi appeared in Bethlehem bearing gifts of "gold, frankincense and myrrh." The gold cited in the Book of Matthew, many experts now believe, was actually golden frankincense, an aromatic resin that was then more precious than even the yellow metal itself. And both the normal frankincense and its golden counterpart probably originated in the recently discovered city of Ubar on the edge of the desolate Ruba'al Khali or Empty Quarter of Oman.

Inspired by boyhood stories and dreams of sunken treasure, Donald Knight searched nearly two decades before he found the ruins of California's deadliest shipwreck: the steamship Brother Jonathan. With the aid of historical archives and the latest technology, the underwater explorer led a 1993 expedition that discovered the mud-covered hulk sitting peacefully on the ocean floor four miles from shore--just as it had since 1865.