"I have been but little in," said Ninian hastily...

Russian scientific submersibles could stop Gulf oil leak, sub skipper says

Russian-owned submersibles would be able to cap the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, the captain of one of the vessels has said.

The skipper was speaking as two of the subs - which can dive to 6,000m - started a campaign of exploration at the bottom of Lake Baikal in Siberia.
...
Standing on a barge that transports the two subs after their submersion, the Mir-2 captain underlined that the subs were probably the only deep-sea vessels in the world capable of stopping the leak.

"Our subs are unique. There are two of them and they can submerge and work simultaneously. Also, they are powerful enough to work with any other additional equipment.

"There are only four vessels in the world that can go down to 6,000m - the Mirs, French Nautile and Japanese Shinkai. The Mirs are known to be the best, and we have a very experienced team of specialists," he said.

But Mr Chernyaev added that such an operation would have a chance of succeeding only if BP or the US government asked the Russian government to join efforts to stop the leak.

...

A BP spokesman told BBC News that the company had not had any formal contact with the Russians.

"We've had over 120,000 people come up with ideas," he said in an e-mail.

"We are looking through all of these to see which are viable. If [the Russians] want to contact us (or may have done so through some other channel), we can evaulate [sic] their idea."

Many thanks to my friend Nick for this link to The Empire That Was.

A Russian photographer in 1907 perfected a technique of taking three black and white photos through red, green, and purple colored lenses and then projecting the developed images back through colored lenses and combining the three projected images onto a screen. Did you get that? Anyway, they were the world's first color photographs. He was hired by Czar Nicholas II to take photographs of the Russian empire and they are quite interesting--color photographs decades before they were common.