Climate of Our Future

Climate Crisis Coalition

Russia’s Deep-Sea Flag-Planting at North Pole Strikes a Chill in Canada. By Doug Struck, The Washington Post, August 7, 2007. “A dramatic submarine dive to plant the Russian flag on the seabed at the North Pole last week has rattled Canadian politics and underscored the growing stakes as the ice cap melts in the oil-rich Arctic. Canada and the United States scoffed at the legal significance of the dive by a Russian mini-sub to set the flag on the seabed Thursday. ‘This isn’t the 15th century. You can’t go around the world and just plant flags’ to claim territory, Canada’s minister of foreign affairs, Peter Mackay, told reporters. But the government here has been thrown on the defensive by the Russian action, accused by critics of doing too little to meet a deadline for the five Arctic nations to map and claim huge areas of the Arctic seabed. A U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker left Seattle on Monday for an area 500 miles north of Barrow, Alaska, where a contingent of 20 scientists are to continue compiling an undersea map in preparation for a U.S. claim of the resources there. Canada has not equipped itself to do the same. It has no icebreakers heavy enough to tackle the Arctic ice head-on… Opposition leader Jack Layton, head of the New Democratic Party… said Sunday, ‘Canada must move quickly and make immediate, strategic investments in its Arctic.’ The 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea gives each of the five Arctic nations — Canada, the United States, Russia, Denmark and Norway — 10 years after their ratification of the treaty to map out the Arctic seabed. The maps, along with sediment samples and other scientific information, can be used to claim parts of the seabed that are extensions of the continental shelf of each nation. The claim would apply to the buried resources, not to the water above. For years, progress under the international treaty was slow. The United States has not ratified the convention, though observers expect that to happen soon under the Democratic-controlled Congress. Global warming has added a sudden urgency to the process by thinning the Arctic ice cap, making drilling and shipping more feasible. The potential rewards are great. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that 25 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas lies in the Arctic.”