And then in the twentieth century, came the Cold War with all its tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. A protective barrier was deemed necessary to guard America from a sudden transpolar air attack. In 1954, President Eisenhower authorized the construction of the Distant Early Warning Line (DEW line), a string of sixty-three radar bases spanning a 6,300-mile length of the Arctic from the Aleutians to Baffin Island in a line 250 to three hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. By the time the project was completed three years later, an influx of more than twenty-five thousand engineers, technicians, and military had flooded these areas. The bilateral agreement establishing the DEW stipulated that Canadians would be employed in the actual construction of the sites with the United States bearing the costs. Although thousands of workers were airlifted from the south, a portion of labour fell to the Inuit, who received training for specific tasks.
No sooner had DEW begun its task of surveillance than the advent of ICBMs and missile-carrying submarines made it obsolete, a short-lived existence, indeed. Work began on dismantling the sites and here again the Inuit were involved. It had been a costly venture for Uncle Sam — from the start of construction in 1954 to the completion of its close-down in 1992, an estimated $900 million had been expended. The impact of those frenzied years of activity on the Inuit in the further loss of their traditional ways and culture should not be underestimated. With establishment of airfields and improved water transport, easier access was had to southern foodstuffs and household goods, to new building materials and mechanized equipment, and to communication with the world.
Native people and non-native learned more of one another as scores of new arrivals from the south flowed into Arctic settlements. Freshly arrived government administrators managed, the preachers preached, physicians healed, entrepreneurs bought and sold, and teachers taught.
Not surprising, then, that the process of Inuit transformation took hold and that it continues to develop. Snow houses and fur tents have been forsaken in favour of timber and prefabricated homes. Sleds and kayaks have given way to skidoos and outboard motors; caribou and sealskin to wool, synthetics, and duffel; story-telling to television and the Internet. A way of life that evolved over millennia has been transformed in a matter of decades and the Inuit emerged into a new world order not of their making and at an enormous social cost, an order not necessarily to universal approval or benefit. One native leader speaks of the fearful possibility of “having to completely reinvent what it means to be an Inuit.”3
* * *
In achieving the 2007 submarine triumph at the North Pole, Artur Chilingarov was satisfied that Russia had taken possession of that northern region. A hundred years earlier, however, a Canadian Arctic mariner, Joseph-Elzéar Bernier from L’lslet, Quebec, on board Canadian Coast Guard ship Arctic, erected on his own initiative a plaque at Winter Harbour at McClure Strait. It read:
This Memorial
is
erected to commemorate
The taking possession for the
DOMINION OF CANADA
Of the whole
ARCTIC ARCHIPELAGO
Lying to the north of America
From long. 60°W to 141°W,
Upto latitude 90°N.
Winter Hbr. Melville Island
C.G.S. Arctic, July 1st 1909
J.E. Bernier, Commander
Not only was Bernier formally laying claim to the vast territory of the archipelago, but also to all that lay up to that ultimate polar dot. The Canadians and then the Russians, two stakeholders defining claims that together encompass three-quarters of the Arctic. Then the other Arctic coastal nations: United States, Denmark, and Norway, each with their own jurisdictional claims and vested interests. Shunting aside the dominant issue of climate change, the absorbing question causing international angst today is: who owns what in the Arctic?
Canadian Coast Guard vessel approaches the barren Hans Island, lying in the narrow channel between Greenland and Ellesmere Island. A negotiated settlement of the Danish-Canadian dispute over the island’s ownership appears imminent. One possibility under consideration is a joint ownership, with half the island going to Denmark and the other to Canada. Such a solution gives rise to the intriguing possibility that Canada would then share a common border with the European Union, just as Russia does.
History records scores of territorial or jurisdictional disputes and most wars are rooted in such quarrels. In today’s world, over two hundred territorial disputes are ongoing — Golan Heights, Falkland Islands, Kashmir, and Gibraltar, for example. (Perhaps the two most comical ones are Rock Island, an extinct volcanic protrusion of 8,500 square feet, which juts out of the North Atlantic, claimed by four nations — the United Kingdom, Ireland, Denmark, and Iceland. The other is a strip of roadway called Passetto di Borgo, ten feet by two hundred, claimed by the Vatican City and Italy.) The Arctic does not escape territorial disputes. Denmark and Canada, for example, both lay claim to the tiny barren Hans Island situated between Greenland and Ellesmere Island. In 1984, Denmark’s minister for Greenland planted his nation’s flag and in a lightedhearted move he left behind a bottle of cognac with the note, “Welcome to the Danish island.” A decade later, Denmark followed up more seriously on the minister’s visit by dispatching a group of warships on manoeuvres around the island. The Canadian press had a field day with the news, offering such tongue-in-cheek headlines as “Canada Being Invaded,” and “Danish Massing Troops on Canadian Territory.” Later that same year, the situation intensified when over 180 Canadian troops took over Hans Island and held military exercises, complete with aircraft, helicopters, and a frigate. And when Canada’s Foreign Minister Bill Graham visited the island in 2005, an immediate objection was raised by the Danish foreign ministry — “We consider Hans Island to be part of Danish territory and will therefore hand over complaint about the Canadian minister’s unannounced visit.” Long-standing friends as the two countries are, the dispute no doubt will find peaceful resolution, although with unconfirmed reports of nearby oil reserves the negotiations are unlikely to be held lightly over that Danish bottle of cognac. The two nations might follow the example of the Norwegians and Russians who in April 2010 amicably settled a forty-year conflict over a 68,000-square-mile maritime area with promising oil reserves — the disputed area was equally divided.
On the other side of the Arctic Ocean, the United States and Canada are at odds over two issues. First, a dispute over the division of the Beaufort Sea. The Canadians hold that the territorial boundary is an extension of the 141° parallel that delineates the Yukon–Alaska border, a line that has been in effect since 1903. The United States takes the position that the boundary is a line perpendicular to the coast where the 141° parallel meets the sea. The difference between the two positions creates an 8,100-square-mile wedge of disputed waters, beneath which are potential oil reserves.
The other dispute is more consequential, carrying international implications. It concerns the Northwest Passage. As global warming brings its changes to the Arctic landscape, the viability of the long-coveted route becomes more real; the icy setting for Amundsen’s successful traverse over a century ago has altered dramatically. In 1969, the specially reinforced American supertanker, the Manhattan, navigated the passage without incident, accompanied by the Canadian icebreaker, Sir John A. Macdonald. In 1984, the Swedish vessel Linblad Explorer, carrying ninety passengers was the first cruise ship to pass through the waterway, and since then a succession of other ships and adventurous yachtsmen have also completed the journey. As for secretive nuclear submarine traffic, there is no accounting of numbers, but it is clear that a subsurface passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific has its attractions.
The crux of the territorial dispute lies in Canada’s contention that the archipelago through which these vessels passed is its sovereign territory, which under international law is subject to the 1982 United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), ratified by 158 countries. By a concept
dating back to the seventeenth century, a nation held sovereignty over a coastline belt of three nautical miles — anything beyond that limit was considered international water open to all without hindrance. UNCLOS extended that baseline to twelve miles (with provision being made for the right of foreign vessels to make non-stop “innocent passages” under certain specific conditions). Additionally, the convention provided for a two-hundred-mile extension from the baseline as an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), by which the coastal nation has sole rights to natural resources lying therein.
Canada claims the EEZ over the entire Arctic Archipelago and therefore sovereignty over the Northwest Passage by reason of historic title. It thus asserts its right to regulate activity and enforce its own law therein. The United States, supported by other maritime nations, views the passage as an international strait, a corridor linking two major bodies of water, like the straits of Magellan, Hormuz, Malacca, and the Bosporus. In 2009, a presidential directive unequivocally declared, “The Northwest Passage is a strait used for international navigation.”
For Canadians, the issue of jurisdiction over the passage is important for reasons of control. First and foremost, the fragile ecology must be protected from environmental damage, and secondly, there must be overseeing of ships flying flags of convenience that cloak their true origins and their owners from accountability.
As drilling and trans-Arctic shipment of gas and oil develops the danger of oil spills loom threateningly — oil takes decades to disperse and degrade in frigid waters. The cleanup of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in comparatively warm waters and that of the devastating 2010 BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in temperate waters were horrendously expensive and lengthy processes, and the toll on animal life and human habitation was reprehensible.
Imagine a replay of the BP catastrophe in the Beaufort Sea or in Davis Strait. The expense and effort of bringing equipment and manpower to such remote places to cope with a spill is unimaginable. The Exxon Valdez spill was confined to a relatively small coastline area, principally within Prince William Sound. If a spill such as that occurred within the complex system of strong Arctic Ocean currents, it would have far-reaching international consequences. The damage sustained to the highly specialized and easily disrupted food chains — from algae and bacteria to mammals and people — would be calamitous. Whereas the Gulf of Mexico disaster brought profound economic and emotional distress to the population and animal life, a similar disaster in the Arctic would most likely terminate a way of life for the affected inhabitants.
A commercial sea lane has already been established for fast delivery of goods from Murmansk to Churchill, which connects by rail with the heartland of North America. As maritime traffic becomes heavier, not only will environmental issues increase exponentially, but security concerns will come to the fore. As Michael Byers points out in Who Owns the Arctic?, one might well anticipate “rogue states and terrorist groups using the Northwest Passage to traffic in weapons of mass destruction, equipment for enriching nuclear isotopes, and missiles. Unlikely as these risks might seem at first, it is not difficult to imagine a captain of this sort of cargo choosing an ice-free, under-policed Northwest Passage over a closely scrutinized Panama Canal.”4
China, Japan, and Korea cast covetous eyes upon budding polar routes, not only for transport of Siberian and Beaufort Sea oil and gas purchases, but for transpolar communication with North American east-coast ports and European markets. A cargo vessel transporting goods from Yokohama to Boston through the Northwest Passage, rather than taking the Panama Canal route, can cut the distance by a quarter, saving time, fuel, and money. China has invested heavily in Alberta tar sands, and with easy access to the sea port at Churchill on the Hudson Bay, the spectre of tankers regularly plying Arctic waters becomes more real.
A suggestion has been made that nuclear-powered submarines might transport liquid gas under the polar cap. In Russia, construction of a floating nuclear power station to provide energy is in progress and there is talk of a possible fleet of such stations eventually delivering energy across that country’s Arctic.
As these lines are being written, exploration is well underway of laying a fibre-optic cable between London and Tokyo by way of the Passage. The ice melt “opens up the construction window to actually do something like this without the need of heavy icebreakers,” explains a spokesman for ArcticLink, as the venture is called (at an estimated cost of $1.2 billion). All this in the interest of quicker transmission time, critical to the financial world where milliseconds count in executing trades.
The magnitude of environmental and security issues in the Northwest Passage are undeniable. Little wonder that Canada takes the position it does on sovereignty over those Arctic waters, particularly as UNCLOS environmental regulations governing international straits are less stringent than its own. The American contention that the Passage falls under international jurisdiction is also meritorious. No doubt agreement on the matter will eventually be reached by Ottawa and Washington, and the same spirit of collaboration will prevail, which brought about the 1817 Rush-Bagot Agreement, demilitarizing the Great Lakes, and also in the establishment of the St. Lawrence Seaway. For the moment, the two neighbours appear content in agreeing to disagree. Russia has kept a low profile in all this, for what’s applicable to the Northwest Passage may be equally applicable to the Northern Sea Route.
The issue of Arctic navigation is real enough, but more burning is the question of who owns the ocean’s seabed. Article 76 of UNCLOS gives a coastal state right to claim ownership of its “extended continental shelf,” even if it stretches beyond the twelve-mile Exclusive Economic Zone. A nation, therefore, that can successfully define its continental shelf can lay claim to sovereign rights of its seabed riches. If USGC estimates of the Arctic oil and gas reserves that lie beneath the ocean floor are correct, then the continental shelf issue becomes of vital interest to all the players.
What then is “continental shelf”? Simply put, it is the gently sloping land that lies submerged around the edges of a continent that extends from the shoreline out to what is called the “continental break.” At this point, the land noticeably drops, causing the waters above to become much deeper, an occurrence that with few exceptions is uniform around the world at approximately 460 feet. According to Article 76, Byers explains, a nation “may claim rights over an ‘extended continental shelf,’ beyond the EEZ, if the depth and shape of the seabed and the thickness of underlying sediments indicate a ‘natural prolongation’ of the shelf closer to shore.” He goes on to note that nations making claims have two options in defining maximum limits: “either 350 nautical miles from shore, or 100 nautical miles beyond the point where the depth of the water reaches 2,500 metres. Again, the coastal state can choose whichever limit or combination of limits works best for it.” It’s a given that with such options being proffered that nations will define claims most advantageous to themselves, irrespective of overlap with others.
A special commission was established by the United Nations, reporting to UNCLOS, to receive supporting documentation from coastal states related to seabed claims. In 2001 Russia made a formal such submission in which it claimed a large part of the Arctic, including the North Pole. Within the country’s continental shelf, the Russians asserted, lay the Mendeleev Ridge and the by-far larger and more significant Lomonosov Ridge, both extensions of its continental sovereign territory. The Lomonosov Ridge extends 1,125 miles from the Anzhu Islands, an archipelago off Siberia’s northeast coast at approximately 76°N, over the central part of the Arctic Ocean, to Ellesmere Island of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. In 2002, the UN commission neither accepted nor rejected Russia’s submission, returning it with the request for additional geological evidence.
Meanwhile, Denmark argued that the Lomonsov Ridge is an extension of Greenland; Norway has made its own submission to UNCLOS and the United States has launched ambitious mapping work to determine the extent of Alaska’s continental shelf.
C
laim and counter-claim: it all appears conflicting, but, in fact, the five nations have banded together to seek harmonious resolutions to the issues by making the decision to map the entire Arctic seabed. Oceanographers continue exploring the ocean floor’s sediments and rock formations with sonar and seismic sensors, and slowly the meticulous undertaking is taking shape. Eventually the completed work, with all the supporting documentation, will be submitted to UNCLOS, which will then have the task of adjudication. Once the territorial claims have been fixed, the platforms and rigs of the oil giants will move in and the face of the ocean’s surface may be expected to change dramatically. Until then it remains the nearly the pristine wilderness of the ages.
On one hand, diminishing ice cover, melting permafrost, and environmental conditions threaten the lives and traditions of many circumpolar communities. On the other hand, the prospect of an ice-free Arctic opens possibility for global trade routes, economic development, and Arctic prosperity. As Charles Emmerson points out in The Future History of the Arctic, “Putting value judgments aside, the consequences of global warming in the Arctic will involve both tragedy and success, destruction and innovation, risk and opportunity, and for better or worse, losers and winners. What is certain is that a static vision of the Arctic is unsustainable in an era of rapid change and shifting climate.”5
Soon alas — perhaps in the lifetime of some of my younger readers — the Arctic sublime, the place that “God had secreted all for himself,” will be but a wondrous memory. And, in the words of Stefansson, it will look more like “a commonplace country… like Michigan or Switzerland.”
Then the sweet songs of the fair-voiced Arctic Siren will beguile no more, silenced forever.
Acknowledgements
FOR THEIR ASSISTANCE AND unfailing courtesy, I owe particular thanks to the staffs of The Bodleian Library, Oxford — particularly that of the Duke Humphrey Room — and the Toronto Reference Library. I wish also to thank the personnel of the Robarts Library of the University of Toronto and the Library of the City of New York. I acknowledge the helpful assistance of United States Naval Archives, Washington, D.C.; the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute, St. Petersburg (Russia); and the Arctic Institute of North America, Calgary. Thanks also to Google Books for providing Internet access to thousands of rare books, and to the Wikimedia Foundation for the helpful material it makes available to the public on Wikipedia.
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