MOSCOW — The Harper government made a far-fetched bid for international attention earlier this month by claiming the North Pole belongs to Canada.
Lost a bit in the noise was that Ottawa botched a long-established deadline for submitting evidence to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf when it said that it needed more time to scientifically link the Canadian land mass (Ellesmere Island) to the Lomonosov Ridge.
Denmark, whose territory, Greenland, is the closest to the North Pole, uses the same ridge as the basis for its claim to a large chunk of the Arctic Ocean. So does Russia, which is physically further away from the top of the world than Canada or Denmark, but has by far the longest Arctic coastline.
All of this is of intense interest not only to Canada, Denmark and Russia, but to the U.S., which has its own claims in the Arctic, and to China, South Korea and even India. As climate change erases the polar ice cap, there may be a mad scramble for a share of the last untapped major oil and gas deposits in the world.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Russian President Vladimir Putin make annual pilgrimages to the Far North. They have used the exotic backdrop of icebergs and ice floes to talk up their respective claims and their plans for the waters and seabeds within 200 nautical miles (370 kilometres) of their coasts which they already have full title to under the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Alas, that’s where the comparisons between Canada and Russia end.
Canada has made many grand announcements about its northern intentions and then dithered. There have been phantom projects to build ports and icebreakers and other ice-strengthened vessels that never get funded because Canada lacks the money or the resolve to back its northern claims.
Putin has taken decisive action to ensure that his country remains pre-eminent in the Far North. Russia is already spending $4.6 billion to increase northern port capacity and open up the Northern Sea Route that is fairly clear of ice during the summer now and has already been used for several years by ice-strengthened cargo ships sailing between the Atlantic and Pacific — while Canada’s Northwest Passage remains ice-choked.
Russia is also building three 33,450 ton nuclear-powered icebreakers at more than $1 billion a piece. Designed to operate year-round in the Arctic, smashing ice as much four metres thick, the first of these leviathans will join the existing fleet of 12 icebreakers in four years.
Further underscoring the Kremlin’s northern resolve, a Russian state company recently bought a struggling Finnish shipbuilding yard that specializes in building ice-strengthened freighters to ply the Northern Sea Route.
Although it may be more for show than anything else, Russia began work earlier this year to reopen a Soviet-era military base on the New Siberian Islands and intends to reopen other Soviet-era northern bases, too.
To prepare its Arctic claim, Russia has spent more than $100 million on five polar expeditions since 2002. The work has involved 13,000 kilometres of bathymetric studies of the depths of the Arctic and 7,000 kilometres of seismic studies of the sea floor.
Moreover, Kremlin has far outdone Canada in the theatrics. In 2007 it sent a pair of mini-subs to plant a titanium replica of the Russian tricolour four and a half kilometres below the surface at the North Pole.
Most Canadians have a romantic idea that they are an Arctic people, even if their idea of going north is to spend the weekend in the Kingdom of the Saguenay, the Muskokas or the Peace River Country. Few Danes, the 50,000 Greenlandic Inuit excepted, would consider themselves an Arctic people.
But thanks to 18th and 19th century Russian expansion through Siberia to the Pacific Ocean and the gulags that proliferated there under the czars and Bolsheviks, millions of Russians have northern connections and nearly one million Russians still live above the Arctic Circle, in places such as Murmansk and Norilsk.
The UN will only say if the scientific findings in support of the competing claims for the top of the world make sense. It will still be up to Russia, Canada and Denmark, who are mostly interested in the staggering amounts of oil and gas believed to be there, to negotiate an agreement over the North Pole. One possibility is to declare the North Pole international waters under UN jurisdiction with the respective claims running up from their land masses to within a few kilometres of the pole.
Even without the North Pole, Russian experts reckon Canada will end up with exclusive title to about 800,000 square kilometres of Arctic seabed. It would make far more sense for Canada to develop realistic plans to develop parts of the Arctic that will unquestionably be Canadian rather than make fanciful boasts about how the North Pole belongs to us.
Original Article
Source: canada.com/
Author: Matthew Fisher
Lost a bit in the noise was that Ottawa botched a long-established deadline for submitting evidence to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf when it said that it needed more time to scientifically link the Canadian land mass (Ellesmere Island) to the Lomonosov Ridge.
Denmark, whose territory, Greenland, is the closest to the North Pole, uses the same ridge as the basis for its claim to a large chunk of the Arctic Ocean. So does Russia, which is physically further away from the top of the world than Canada or Denmark, but has by far the longest Arctic coastline.
All of this is of intense interest not only to Canada, Denmark and Russia, but to the U.S., which has its own claims in the Arctic, and to China, South Korea and even India. As climate change erases the polar ice cap, there may be a mad scramble for a share of the last untapped major oil and gas deposits in the world.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Russian President Vladimir Putin make annual pilgrimages to the Far North. They have used the exotic backdrop of icebergs and ice floes to talk up their respective claims and their plans for the waters and seabeds within 200 nautical miles (370 kilometres) of their coasts which they already have full title to under the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Alas, that’s where the comparisons between Canada and Russia end.
Canada has made many grand announcements about its northern intentions and then dithered. There have been phantom projects to build ports and icebreakers and other ice-strengthened vessels that never get funded because Canada lacks the money or the resolve to back its northern claims.
Putin has taken decisive action to ensure that his country remains pre-eminent in the Far North. Russia is already spending $4.6 billion to increase northern port capacity and open up the Northern Sea Route that is fairly clear of ice during the summer now and has already been used for several years by ice-strengthened cargo ships sailing between the Atlantic and Pacific — while Canada’s Northwest Passage remains ice-choked.
Russia is also building three 33,450 ton nuclear-powered icebreakers at more than $1 billion a piece. Designed to operate year-round in the Arctic, smashing ice as much four metres thick, the first of these leviathans will join the existing fleet of 12 icebreakers in four years.
Further underscoring the Kremlin’s northern resolve, a Russian state company recently bought a struggling Finnish shipbuilding yard that specializes in building ice-strengthened freighters to ply the Northern Sea Route.
Although it may be more for show than anything else, Russia began work earlier this year to reopen a Soviet-era military base on the New Siberian Islands and intends to reopen other Soviet-era northern bases, too.
To prepare its Arctic claim, Russia has spent more than $100 million on five polar expeditions since 2002. The work has involved 13,000 kilometres of bathymetric studies of the depths of the Arctic and 7,000 kilometres of seismic studies of the sea floor.
Moreover, Kremlin has far outdone Canada in the theatrics. In 2007 it sent a pair of mini-subs to plant a titanium replica of the Russian tricolour four and a half kilometres below the surface at the North Pole.
Most Canadians have a romantic idea that they are an Arctic people, even if their idea of going north is to spend the weekend in the Kingdom of the Saguenay, the Muskokas or the Peace River Country. Few Danes, the 50,000 Greenlandic Inuit excepted, would consider themselves an Arctic people.
But thanks to 18th and 19th century Russian expansion through Siberia to the Pacific Ocean and the gulags that proliferated there under the czars and Bolsheviks, millions of Russians have northern connections and nearly one million Russians still live above the Arctic Circle, in places such as Murmansk and Norilsk.
The UN will only say if the scientific findings in support of the competing claims for the top of the world make sense. It will still be up to Russia, Canada and Denmark, who are mostly interested in the staggering amounts of oil and gas believed to be there, to negotiate an agreement over the North Pole. One possibility is to declare the North Pole international waters under UN jurisdiction with the respective claims running up from their land masses to within a few kilometres of the pole.
Even without the North Pole, Russian experts reckon Canada will end up with exclusive title to about 800,000 square kilometres of Arctic seabed. It would make far more sense for Canada to develop realistic plans to develop parts of the Arctic that will unquestionably be Canadian rather than make fanciful boasts about how the North Pole belongs to us.
Original Article
Source: canada.com/
Author: Matthew Fisher
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