The Arctic
Posted by fredtopeka on August 11, 2007
The race for the Artic seems to be heating up:
Canada’s prime minister announced plans Friday for an army training center and a deepwater port on the third day of an Arctic trip meant to assert sovereignty over a region, while Denmark said it was staking its own claim with a scientific expedition.
The United States, meanwhile, launched an expedition Friday toward the Arctic to map the sea floor off Alaska, but a scientist linked to the project denied the U.S. was actively joining the Acrtic competition.
The race to secure subsurface rights to the Arctic seabed heated up when Russia sent two small submarines to plant a tiny national flag under the North Pole last week. The United States and Norway also have competing claims in the vast Arctic region, where a U.S. study suggests as much as 25 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas could be hidden.
All of these were planned a while ago, but their convergence shows how important the Arctic is to the countries. At least the Scandinavian countries are cooperating:
The Danes plan to set off from Norway’s remote Arctic islands of Svalbard aboard the Swedish icebreaker Oden, which will be assisted by a powerful Russian nuclear icebreaker to plow through ice as thick as 16 feet in the area north of Greenland.
