http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ ... IN22/TPSto
ry/TPInternational/America/
The race to own the top of the world
Melting icecap has circumpolar countries - including Canada - scrambling to
bolster their claims to Arctic territory and the oil and gas riches beneath
its seabed
July 22, 2008
PAUL KORING
MOSCOW -- 'We were there first and we can claim the entire Arctic, but if
our neighbours like Canada want some part of it, then maybe we can negotiate
with them," says Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the flamboyant Russian
ultranationalist, who happily hands out pictures of a Russian flag sitting
on the seabed at the North Pole.
Mr. Zhirinovsky, the populist leader of Russia's misnamed Liberal Democratic
Party, is often derided in the West as an extremist xenophobe, but a clash
over who controls the top of the world and the oil and gas beneath the
Arctic seabed seems inevitable.
The Russians staked the North Pole as theirs and last summer dropped a flag
on the seabed to prove it, much to the mocking outrage of Prime Minister
Stephen Harper's government.
"This isn't the 15th century. You can't go around the world and plant flags
and say, 'We're claiming this territory,' " fumed former foreign minister
Peter Mackay, who failed to mention that his predecessor had tromped ashore
tiny and disputed Hans Island, claimed by both Canada and Denmark, and
planted the Maple Leaf.
Supposedly cooler heads prevailed in Greenland this spring at a meeting of
the five circumpolar countries: Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia and the
United States. They agreed "to the orderly settlement of any possible
overlapping claims" in a joint communiqué called the Ilulissat Declaration.
But the race to claim the top of the world and, more importantly, reap the
vast bonanza of oil and gas believed to lie beneath the Arctic seabed is
only just getting under way.
Since last summer's brouhaha, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has
repeatedly tried to chill the passions, suggesting that the flag planting
wasn't really staking a territorial claim. He often notes that U.S.
astronauts left flags on the moon without claiming it.
But global warming hasn't made the moon's riches easier to plunder.
Modern man's burning of fossil fuels may be melting the Arctic icecap,
making it technically and economically feasible - especially in an era of
red-hot energy prices - to pry open the globe's last great untapped
reservoirs of oil and gas.
That prospect has set off a scramble among countries with Arctic coastlines
to try to bolster their claims under the United Nations Convention on the
Law of the Sea.
The "rapid melting of the polar icecaps," says a European Union report, will
allow the "accessibility of the enormous hydrocarbon resources in the Arctic
region," and is "changing the geo-strategic dynamics of the region."
No surprise, then, that Russia is conducting naval exercises in the Arctic.
Canada had soldiers stamping about in the North this spring, and some
analysts fear power projection, not talks at the UN, will decide who
controls the Arctic.
Under the Convention on the Law of the Sea, countries can extend their zones
beyond 200 nautical miles (about 370 kilometres) from their coasts if they
can prove the outer edge of the continental shelf extends beyond that
distance. Hence, the contentious Russian claim to the Lomonosov Ridge.
The prize may be huge. One study estimates 400 billion barrels of oil lie
beneath the Arctic seabed, beyond the existing 200-nautical-mile economic
zones where countries can regulate and control drilling. That's a little
less than the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia and Iran combined.
Russia's still-to-be-formalized claim to the 2,000-kilometre-long Lomonosov
Ridge, which rises more than 3,000 metres off the Arctic Ocean floor and
extends from Russia all the way to North America, could be just the
beginning of a new squabble.
Canada and Denmark have disputed Russia's claim. All three countries may
wind up bolstering each other's claim as they attempt to divvy up the Arctic
with the pole as the midpoint.
Even if Artur Chilingarov, the 2007 Russian expedition leader, was indulging
in a bit of swashbuckling bravado when he claimed "the Arctic is Russian,"
the scramble is on to find geological evidence to push territorial claims
into the centre of the Arctic Ocean.
Suggestions for politicians to cease firing salvos of accusatory,
claim-staking rhetoric across the pole can be heard in Canada as well.
"Nationalist arguments that feature alarmism and more than a little paranoia
only conceal the facts about Canada and the Arctic," Whitney Lackenbauer, a
history professor, said in a paper on Arctic sovereignty released yesterday
by the Canadian International Council.
While the five circumpolar countries say they can divvy up and run the
Arctic among themselves once their claims are sorted out, others warn of
dire environmental consequences.
As the ice recedes, new rules are needed to prevent "a rush to exploit all
the available resources of the Arctic - another Klondike - and avoiding the
destabilizing effects of massive infrastructure developments," said
Jacqueline McGlade, executive director of the European Environment Agency.
*****
Northwest Passage
Canada is boosting its presence in the Far North to solidify its claim to
the passage
Lomonosov Ridge
Russia claims the ridge is an undersea extension of its land mass.
Shrinking rink
Median minimum extent of sea ice cover over the years
KEY DISPUTES
1. Canada and the United States both claim a valuable pie-shaped slice of
the Beaufort Sea. Ottawa draws its boundary straight north out to sea along
the 141st meridian, while Washington prefers a line equidistant from the
coasts. At stake is an offshore undersea basin expected to hold a motherlode
of oil and gas.
2. Norway and Russia have a similar dispute over how to draw their maritime
boundary. Moscow echoes Canada's self-serving preference for "due north"
along a meridian, while Norway claims a big chunk jutting into the Barents
Sea based on its ownership of tiny, remote Bear Island. Not surprisingly,
one of the world's richest and yet-to-be exploited gas fields lies beneath
its shallow waters.
3. Canada sees value in its claim to the Northwest Passage - the winding
route between its Arctic islands leading from the Atlantic to the Beaufort
and thus providing a northern shortcut linking Europe and Asia. However,
Washington argues (and it seems anyone else in the world that has voiced an
opinion) that the Northwest Passage is an international strait - wider at
its narrowest than the 12-nautical-mile extent of territorial waters. And
therefore no different from other vital international sealanes such as the
Straits of Hormuz or Gibraltar.
4. Tiny, barren and unpopulated, Hans Island, in the middle of Nares Strait
separating Canada's Ellesmere Island from Denmark's Greenland, is also
disputed. Both countries lay claim to the 1.3-square-kilometre island, which
could become a test case for resolving the jumble of overlapping claims in
the Arctic.
5. Even the maritime boundary line separating Alaska from Russia and running
from the Bering Sea north to the Arctic Ocean, supposedly fixed in a 1990
pact between the former Soviet Union and the United States, may be coming
unravelled. The Russian Duma has never ratified the pact and while Russia
was supposed to inherit all of the international treaties agreed to by the
Soviet Union, some Russian parliamentarians want the deal reopened.
PAUL KORING, TONIA COWAN/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Source maps prepared by Hugo Ahlenius,
UNEP/GRID-Arendal,
http://www.unep.org
SOURCES: United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP);F. Fetterer and K.
Knowles; National Snow and Ice Data Center; United States Geological Survey;
Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme; Conservation of Arctic Flora and
Fauna; World Conservation Monitoring Centre; United States Energy
Information Administration; International Energy Agency; Barents Euro-Arctic
Council; Comité professionnel du pétrole, Paris; Institut français du
pétrole; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; The World Bank;
Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, division of Spill
Prevention and Response; United States Coast Guard; ESRI Data & Maps;
shadedrelief.com; World Data Center for Marine Geology & Geophysics;
University of Durham.
Energy giants forging ahead
Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, ordered two huge, semi-submersible,
offshore drilling platforms this month. These are massive units tough enough
to drill in the iceberg-strewn Barents Sea, where one of the world's largest
untapped gas fields lies deep beneath frigid waters.
While environmentalists fret and scientists frantically revise
ever-shortening predictions of when global warming will melt the Arctic's
ice, oil and gas giants are spending billions to drill deeper and farther
offshore.
Most of the drilling - including Russia's huge new Shtokman field in the
Barents Sea - is on the continental shelf, but even richer fields may lie
far offshore in the High Arctic.
The U.S. Geological Survey estimates a quarter of the world's undiscovered
oil and gas lies in the Arctic. Many of the potentially richest basins are
yet to be drilled or explored. The Amundsen and Makarov basins, lying on
either side of the long, underwater Lomonosov Ridge, claimed by Russia, may
hold rich reserves, said Viktor Posyolov, deputy director of the Russian
Institute of Ocean Geology in St. Petersburg. He says bottom-sampling work
conducted by Russian, Canadian and Danish scientists may be needed to sort
out the geology and thus the sovereignty of the Arctic. But the scientists
are strapped for money, he said, and would welcome some circumpolar
co-operation.
The energy giants, meanwhile, are forging ahead. Russian Prime Minister
Vladimir Putin this week visited the Sevmash shipyard - still closed to
non-Russians - where a massive oil rig designed to operate in pack ice at
-50 degrees is being built. Paul Koring
I'm keeping an open mind, besides I don't drive anyway 
