Global Warming and Northern Sovereignty

With much of the world's oil and gas fields mapped and already under production, one of the few remaining untouched regions of the world is the Arctic. The Arctic, unlike the Antarctic, is an ocean that is covered by ice most of the year. Though the ice does retreat, the northern zones are never free of ice. Until recently, weather and technology conspired against the prospect of drilling for oil and natural gas in the Arctic Ocean. However, with global warming, this is changing. Claims are being laid to the Arctic and plans are being made to eventually explore and exploit the Arctic waters for its oil and natural gas resources.

The BBC provides an insightful piece examining the quest for Arctic resources. The article notes:

The Arctic's commercial potential has sent most leading energy companies scurrying into harsh and remote areas in North America, Russia's Siberia and the Barents Sea - all parts of a region that is believed to contain as much as a quarter of the world's undiscovered reserves of oil and gas.

Recently, Canada's Prime Minister announced that the Canadian government would be investing in upgrading Canada's navy to ensure Canada's presence in the Arctic and to lay claim to Canadian sovereignty in the Northwest Passage and the High Arctic. The Prime Minister recently asserted that Canada would deploy military icebreakers to monitor and defend the northern Arctic waters.

Canada is not the only state that has been seeking to lay claim to the Arctic. Recently, Russia has been sending submarines under the Arctic Ocean to map the ocean floor. According to an article in the Russian News and Information Agency:

The nuclear-powered ice-breaker Rossiya will escort the Academician Fedorov, the flagship of the Federal Service for Hydrometeorology and Environment Monitoring, which will take about a hundred scientists from Murmansk to the North Pole. Along with unique studies of the far-northern continental shelf, the expedition will carry out the first-ever Arctic dives using the mini-submarine Mir. The first crew will descend to a depth of more than four kilometers, with the deputy speaker of the Duma on board.

But Chilingarov acknowledges the expedition's geopolitical goal: "We want to prove that Russia is a great polar power." A titanium capsule with the Russian flag will be dropped to the bottom as evidence of this. In other words, Russia will publicly stake its claim to the North Pole.

Strictly speaking, Russia claims a triangle-shaped area of the Arctic Ocean; its base includes the Russian coast from the Kola Peninsula in the west to the tip of the Chukotka Peninsula in the east, across the Bering Strait from Alaska. The apex is the North Pole. This triangle covers 1.2 million square kilometers, an area the size of Italy, Germany and France put together. Generally speaking, we have always considered it our own. Starting in the 1920s, this sector was marked as Soviet and later Russian territorial waters on all the country's maps.

At least, this was the case before the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea limited us to a 200-mile economic zone along our coast. Having ratified it in 1997, we immediately lost our right to the rest of the Arctic Ocean, including our chunk of the North Pole. Other countries, not only those ringing the Arctic, laid claims to what we had lost. This is understandable. According to some estimates, the continental shelf holds about 100 billion tons of oil plus a wealth of fish species. Moreover, the Northern Sea Route, running through the Arctic Ocean along Russia's northern coast, is the shortest way from Europe to Asia and the Pacific coast of America, which will make it easy to transport oil and gas from Arctic deposits. The shelf will bring in an enormous amount of money to whomever has the right to develop it.

Though Russia has lost that right, we can still try and get it back. The same convention gives us a chance. If we prove that the shelf - the oceanic Lomonosov ridge - is a continuation of the Siberian continental platform, we can practically have the whole lot to ourselves. Five years ago, Russia was the first Arctic nation to submit an application to a special UN commission set up to determine the ocean's status, but international experts did not find our arguments convincing. We will have another go in 2009 and are now getting ready for it.

What is at stake are the massive reserves of oil and gas that are thought to lie below the Arctic Ocean.

However, there is much at stake. The Arctic with its massive icebergs and sheets of ice is an inhospitable region of the world to drill and the environmental dangers are enormous. In the coming decades, there will certainly be a push to control the region's resources and the various states will jockey for control of the Arctic Ocean. The challenge is to ensure that the Arctic's environment is protected and that local populations will not suffer unduly from future development in this region.