Putin's Arctic invasion: Russia lays claim to the North Pole

Russian President Vladimir Putin is making an astonishing bid to grab a vast chunk of the Arctic - so he can tap its vast potential oil, gas and mineral wealth.

His scientists claim an underwater ridge near the North Pole is really part of Russia's continental shelf.

One newspaper printed a map of the "new addition", a triangle five times the size of Britain with twice as much oil as Saudi Arabia.

The dramatic move provoked an international outcry. The U.S. and Canada expressed shock and environment campaigners said it would be a disaster.

Observers say the move is typical of Putin's muscle-flexing as he tries to increase Russian power.

Under current international law, the countries ringing the Arctic - -Russia, Canada, the U.S., Norway, and Denmark (which owns Greenland) - are limited to a 200-mile economic zone around their coasts. Putin claims that an underwater Russian ridge is linked to the North Pole A UN convention says none can claim jurisdiction over the Arctic seabed because the geological structure does not match the surrounding continental shelves.

But Russian scientists have returned from a six-week mission on a nuclear ice-breaker to claim that the 1,220-mile long underwater Lomonosov Ridge is geologically linked to the Siberian continental platform - and similar in structure.

The region is currently administered by the International Seabed Authority but this is now being challenged by Moscow.

Experts estimate the ridge has ten billion tons of gas and oil deposits and significant sources of diamonds, gold, tin, manganese, nickel, lead and platinum.

A Russian attempt to claim Arctic territory was rejected five years ago, but this time Moscow plans to make a far more serious submission to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf. A British diplomatic source warned

that Russia was planning to secure its grip on oil and gas supplies "for decades to come".

He said: "Putin wants a strong Russia, and Western dependence on it for oil and gas supplies is a key part of his strategy. He no longer cares if it upsets the West."

The U.S. state department said the Russian claim was completely unacceptable. "It's an extraordinary idea and I can't believe it will go anywhere," an official said.

Green groups warned that the Kremlin claim could devastate one of the world's last unspoilt areas.

John Sauven, director of Greenpeace UK, said: "We think nations should stop searching for new sources of fossil fuel and focus instead on the alternatives - renewables, energy efficiency and decentralised energy systems.

Ted Nield, of the Geological Society in London, branded Russia's claim nonsensical.

"The notion that geological structures can somehow dictate ownership is deeply peculiar," he said.

"Anyway, the Lomonosov Ridge is not part of a continental shelf - it is the point at which two ocean floor plates under the Arctic Ocean are spreading apart.

"It extends from Russia across to Canada, which means Canada could use the same argument and say the ridge is part of the Canadian shelf.

"If you take that to its logical conclusion, Canada could claim Russia and the whole of Eurasia as its own."

Here’s a related story from an email I sent out to my list last year:

Taipei Times
Oil-hungry nations eying Antarctica’s reserves By Ben Sandilands
THE OBSERVER, CANBERRA Tuesday, Jul 25, 2006, Page 9
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2006/07/25/2003320353

The specter of a massive oil rush in Antarctica stole the spotlight from melting ice sheets at a recent summit on polar research in Hobart, the capital city of the Australian island of Tasmania.

At first, all attention was on predictions — based on global warming — of a 6m rise in sea levels from the melting of the West Antarctica Ice Sheet within a few hundred years, and on a possible return of trees, for the first time in 34 million years, to the milder fringes of the main continent this century.

That was until the Iranian authority on oil reserves, Ali Samsam Bakhtiari, told delegates to the meeting of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research “there is only one frontier left, and that is Antarctica.”

He told them that the protections given by the Antarctic Treaty’s 1993 Madrid Protocol, which reserved the continent of ice for “peace and science” were meaningless.

Bakhtiari said the real power was held by the energy companies.

“The day they decide, they will go in,” he said. “They are very powerful, because crude oil makes the world turn around.”

Running out

Bakhtiari’s comments followed his widely reported claim that remaining Middle East oil reserves were about half the amount publicly claimed by those controlling the resource, and that oil production has peaked and will decline sharply just as the soaring demands of India and China really kick in.

Bakhtiari’s comments fuelled simmering pressure from the Australian government’s back benchers to become more aggressive about planning to exploit all of the mineral resources believed to exist in Antarctica’s vast white wilderness.

Australia claims 42 percent of Antarctica as its sovereign territory, as well as most of the vast Southern Ocean between its mainland and the ice continent.

When maverick coalition Senator Barnaby Joyce openly called for Australia to make a pre-emptive move on the southern polar riches earlier this year, he was disowned by the environmental minister, Senator Ian Campbell, who stuck to the official line that the country would unwaveringly honor its Antarctica Treaty obligations to refrain from any activities other than scientific research.

Joyce is unrepentant.

He says “there’s gold, there’s iron ore, there’s coal and there’s huge fish resources. We can’t fool ourselves that other countries won’t move in on them.”

The Australian Greens leader, Senator Bob Brown, says Joyce is right for all the wrong reasons.

“The treaty is worthy but unenforceable,” Brown says. “The government is refusing to take any meaningful steps to stop the Japanese killing hundreds of whales for scientific purposes in the Antarctic waters we claim as our economic zone and it will give in on oil like it is doing with uranium exports to other countries the moment it is asked to by America.”

“We’ve already seen the Americans drop hints about researching, as in drilling, for hydrocarbons in the sedimentary basins known to exist off the Antarctic coast,” he says.

“The Southern Ocean is absolutely critical to the global environment as a source of nutrient-rich cool water currents, and any drilling accident could have far more terrible consequences than the mishaps we have seen in Alaskan waters for example,” he says.

Fragile topic

The fragility of the Antarctic Treaty is a sensitive topic for Australia. No member nation can veto anything, and can do anything it wishes within the territorial claims of countries, including Australia, without any notification or request for permission.

The French destroyed a penguin rookery by building a rock runway in Australian territory, against scientific advice. The Russians are planning to drill a controversial bore hole into Lake Vostok, a vast uncontaminated pool of water beneath 4km of ice, against a chorus of international and protests. India has decided to build a base right in the middle of a special sanctuary supposed to protect some of the few open-water lakes on the edge of the continent.

The treaty, which is little more than a list of good intentions, is also powerless to stop non-treaty states from doing anything, including drilling for oil tomorrow.

Industry estimates of the oil price at which a large off-shore oil field in the iceberg-choked environment of the Southern Ocean would become viable range between US$150 to US$200 a barrel.

With the price of oil approaching US$80, tripling in just over two years, in this case, “tomorrow” might really mean tomorrow.

Here’s another from March of this year.

Riches await as Earth’s icy north melts
AP via NOLA ^ | 3/25/2007 | DOUG MELLGREN
Posted on 03/25/2007 1:43:36 AM EDT by thackney
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1806353/posts

Barren and uninhabited, Hans Island is very hard to find on a map. Yet these days the Frisbee-shaped rock in the Arctic is much in demand so much so that Canada and Denmark have both staked their claim to it with flags and warships.

The reason: an international race for oil, fish, diamonds and shipping routes, accelerated by the impact of global warming on Earth’s frozen north.

“... some see a lucrative silver lining of riches waiting to be snatched from the deep, and the prospect of timesaving sea lanes that could transform the shipping industry the way the Suez Canal did in the 19th century.

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates the Arctic has as much as 25 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas. Russia reportedly sees the potential of minerals in its slice of the Arctic sector approaching $2 trillion.

All this has pushed governments and businesses into a scramble for sovereignty over these suddenly priceless seas.

Regardless of climate change, oil and gas exploration in the Arctic is moving full speed ahead. State-controlled Norwegian oil company Statoil ASA plans to start tapping gas from its offshore Snoehvit field in December, the first in the Barents Sea. It uses advanced equipment on the ocean floor, remote-controlled from the Norwegian oil boom town of Hammerfest through a 90-mile undersea cable.

Alan Murray, an analyst with the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie, said most petroleum companies are now focusing research and exploration on the far north. Russia is developing the vast Shkotman natural gas field off its Arctic coast, and Norwegians hope their advanced technology will find a place there.

“Oil will bring a big geopolitical focus. It is a driving force in the Arctic,” said Arvid Jensen, a consultant in Hammerfest who advises companies that hope to hitch their economic wagons to the northern rush.

It could open the North Pole region to easy navigation for five months a year, according to the latest Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, an intergovernmental group. That could cut sailing time from Germany to Alaska by 60 percent, going through Russia’s Arctic instead of the Panama Canal.

Or the Northwest Passage could open through the channels of Canada’s Arctic islands and shorten the voyage from Europe to the Far East. And that’s where Hans Island, at the entrance to the Northwest Passage, starts to matter.

The half-square-mile rock, just one-seventh the size of New York’s Central Park, is wedged between Canada’s Ellesmere Island and Danish-ruled Greenland, and for more than 20 years has been a subject of unusually bitter exchanges between the two NATO allies.

In 1984, Denmark’s minister for Greenland affairs, Tom Hoeyem, caused a stir when he flew in on a chartered helicopter, raised a Danish flag on the island, buried a bottle of brandy at the base of the flagpole and left a note saying: “Welcome to the Danish island.”

The dispute erupted again two years ago when Canadian Defense Minister Bill Graham set foot on the rock while Canadian troops hoisted the Maple Leaf flag.

Denmark sent a letter of protest to Ottawa, while Canadians and Danes took out competing Google ads, each proclaiming sovereignty over the rock 680 miles south of the North Pole.

Some Canadians even called for a boycott of Danish pastries.

Although both countries have repeatedly sent warships to the island to make their presence felt, there’s no risk of a shooting war both sides are resolved to settle the problem peacefully. But the prospect of a warmer planet opening up the icy waters has helped push the issue up the agenda.

“We all realize that because of global warming it will suddenly be an area that will become more accessible,” said Peter Taksoe-Jensen, head of the Danish Foreign Ministry’s legal department.

Shortcuts through Arctic waters are no longer the stuff of science fiction.

In August 2005, the Akademik Fyodorov of Russia was the first ship to reach the North Pole without icebreaker help. The Norwegian shipyard Aker Yards is building innovative vessels that sail forward in clear waters, and then turn around to plow with their sterns through heavier ice.

Global warming is also bringing an unexpected bonus to American transportation company OmniTrax Inc., which a decade ago bought the small underutilized Northwest Passage port of Churchill, Manitoba, for a token fee of 10 Canadian dollars (about $8).

The company, which is private, won’t say how much money it is making in Churchill, but it was estimated to have moved more than 500,000 tons of grain through the port in 2007.

Managing director Michael Ogborn said climate change was not something the company thought about in 1997.

“But over the last 10 years we saw a lengthening of the season, which appears to be related to global warming,” Ogborn said. “We see the trend continuing.”

Just a few years ago, reports said it would take 100 years for the ice to melt, but recent studies say it could happen in 10-15 years, and the United States, Canada, Russia, Denmark and Norway have been rushing to stake their claims in the Arctic.

Norway and Russia have issues in the Barents Sea; the U.S. and Russia in Beaufort Sea; the U.S. and Canada over rights to the Northwest Passage; and even Alaska and Canada’s Yukon province over their offshore boundary.

Canada, Russia and Denmark are seeking to claim waters all the way up to the North Pole, saying the seabed is part of their continental shelf under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Norway wants to extend its claims on the same basis, although not all the way to the pole.

Canada says the Northwest Passage is its territory, a claim the United States hotly disputes, insisting the waters are neutral. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has pledged to put military icebreakers in the frigid waters “to assert our sovereignty and take action to protect our territorial integrity.”

“...Russia contests Norway’s claims to fish-rich waters around the Arctic Svalbard Islands, and has even sent warships there to underscore its discontent with the Norwegian Coast Guard boarding Russian trawlers there.

“Even though they say it is about fish, it is really about oil,” said Jensen, the consultant in Hammerfest.

In 2004, Russian President Vladimir Putin called the sovereignty issue “a serious, competitive battle” that “will unfold more and more fiercely.” ..” ~

Associated Press reporters Beth Duff-Brown in Toronto, Phil Couvrette in Montreal, Mike Eckel in Moscow, Dan Joling in Anchorage, Alaska, and Karl Ritter in Stockholm, Sweden, contributed to this report. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070324/ap_on_sc/arctic_bonanza

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