The Arctic has not seen so much diplomatic excitement since the end of the Cold War. The one constant in all this activity was the view that the Law of the Sea provided the framework for sorting out Arctic sovereignty. That point had first been stressed in a meeting in Ilulissat in Greenland, hastily arranged by Denmark just a few months after the Russian flag reached the seabed.4 The meeting’s goal was to kill any idea that there would be an aggressive race for the North Pole. The five nations that rim the Arctic seas (United States, Russia, Canada, Norway, and Denmark-Greenland) signed a declaration telling the world that, “an extensive international legal framework applies to the Arctic Ocean,” which would provide for the orderly settlement of claims. “The rules are in place,” said Stig Moller, Denmark’s foreign minister.
Such was the enthusiasm for the “rules” in Ilulissat that everyone forgot to mention that there are several long-running disagreements between these very same Arctic states that the Law of the Sea cannot quickly resolve. Border disputes between America and Canada and between Norway and Russia have continued for decades. There is a less important spat between Greenland and Canada over tiny Hans Island, and the strange case of Svalbard—an archipelago of far northern islands where Norway has sovereignty, but where a curious 1920 treaty guarantees access to many other nations. Here there are fishery disputes with Russia that could begin to involve oil wealth too.
Other disputes were only heightened in this first round of Arctic diplomacy. The United States reasserted its long-held position that the Northwest Passage, which winds among Canada’s islands, is an “international strait,” not an “internal waterway.” Other nation’s ships thus do not need Canada’s permission to pass through it. That view, supported by Europe, has been enraging Canadians ever since 1969 when the United States sent the giant ice-breaking oil tanker Manhattan through the passage. The United States also regards key straits on the northern route around Siberia as “for international navigation,” a view which Russia does not accept.
Those who were pushing for a comprehensive new treaty to bring peace and stability to the Arctic were also disappointed. In October 2008, the European parliament had passed a resolution demanding the start of international negotiations; 5 earlier, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) had published a report laying out the logic for a new treaty.6 One much-cited model was the Antarctic Treaty, which has successfully frozen territorial claims, kept out industry, mining, and the military, and preserved Antarctica for peaceful scientific cooperation. But the U.S. directive bluntly stated: “An Arctic treaty of broad scope—along the lines of the Antarctic Treaty—is not appropriate or necessary.”
Also sidelined were calls for the Arctic Council to play a bigger part in governing the Arctic. The Arctic Council is the region’s most important high-level forum, with representation from the eight Arctic states (the five Arctic Ocean states, plus Iceland, Sweden, and Finland) along with permanent participation from the Inuit Circumpolar Council and five other indigenous groups. A range of nongovernmental organizations have permanent observer status, as do representatives from France, Germany, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. The council has no authority to make laws or set regulations, but it has been able to steer the priorities of the Arctic nations and issue authoritative reports (on pollution and Arctic climate change, for example) which have driven action by other bodies. Although the council lacks power, it has enormous influence, which is why China, Korea, Italy, and the European Union are lining up to gain observer status. The U.S. directive said it was not to be “transformed into a formal international organization.” The message is clear: it is to the Law of the Sea, rather than big new treaties, that we must turn to look at the future governance of the Arctic, at least in the next decade when change is at its most rapid.
The first thing that the Law of the Sea can do is to allow claims for a bigger slice of the Arctic seas to be assessed in an orderly way. Article 76 of the Law insists that a claim to sovereign rights over an “extended continental shelf” must be driven by geological data and not flags. Claims go for examination by the twenty-one experts that make up the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf at the United Nations headquarters in New York, and they need to be submitted quickly. Each nation has only ten years from the date it ratifies the convention.
Russia put in its claim promptly in 2001. The map of the claim (which is public, although the data behind it are not) shows great ambitions: Russia would have gained rights over half the Arctic, running right up to the North Pole. The commission cannot reject claims, but it can send them back. That is what it did, saying “more geological evidence needed.” Russia has been busy sending out Arctic survey ships ever since.
The Law established that all coastal nations have a right to an exclusive economic zone (EEZ) that extends 200 nautical miles from the “baseline” of their shores. That is undisputed, and thanks to the many islands in the Arctic, immediately takes huge chunks out of the seas. Further claims can be made out to an absolute maximum of either 350 nautical miles from the baseline or 100 nautical miles from the 2,500-meter (1.5-mile) depth contour line, whichever of these distances is the greater. The Arctic is ringed by shallow seas (a little over half the entire Arctic seas are shelf) so there are many places where the waters pass well beyond the 350-nautical-mile limit before their depth falls to 2,500 meters; most are off Russia where the shelf can extend 500 nautical miles from land.
Several other strict criteria have to be met in order to claim seabeds within those final limits. States must show that the sea bottom they claim is a “natural prolongation” of their own land, that is, it is not just joined physically to the land but sharing the same geological history. If that condition is satisfied, nations can claim out to the “edge” of the shallow shelves (provided they don’t exceed the limits), where the continent ends and the abyss of the deep seas begins.
To complicate matters further, there are two different ways to define the “edge.” The first makes immediate intuitive sense: it is sixty nautical miles past the “foot” of the slope, which is where the steep drop at the shelf edge levels off after it reaches the deeper ocean floor. The second is more puzzling. The edge can be placed where the thickness of sediment on the seabed is “at least 1 percent” of the distance back to the foot of the slope. That means the edge could be placed a hundred miles out from the foot of the slope if the sediment there were one mile thick.
At this point I needed help and I turned to Ron Macnab, a Canadian who is the father figure of Arctic mapping. Macnab began his career as a naval officer and used to spend “hours standing watch on the bridge, staring out to the ocean wondering what in the world is going on, in and under it.” Working with the Geological Survey of Canada, he helped create the International Bathymetric Chart of the Arctic Ocean. He still sports a neat naval beard and moustache, but these days he is “retired” which means he runs around chairing meetings on the Law of the Sea and Arctic geology.
The rule about sediment thickness, he says, is called the “Irish formula,” after the three Irishmen who developed it. Sediment slides off the edge of the continental shelves and builds up thick layers in the deeper sea alongside. These thick sedimentary basins are exactly the kind of place where oil and gas is found. “The rule provides a framework for ensuring the coastal states will have a worthwhile piece of the sedimentary basin in which they could drill for oil,” he explains. The thickness of the sediment gradually tapers off farther out to sea and the formula provides a cutoff within which coastal states have rights to a potential source of wealth.
To make a claim under the Law of the Sea, explains Macnab, the essential data you need are the depth of the seabed and the depth and distribution of sedimentary material below it. The depth data are obtained using sonar to ping the bottom and record the returning echo. To look at the sediment beneath requires seismic profiling, which involves making a series of very loud noises that penetrate the seabed and echo back from the layers of sedi
ment beneath to an array of microphones.
“In principle, the rules are quite straightforward,” says Macnab, “but in fact, there is a lot of ambiguity in it, starting with how you define the foot of the slope. The convention was a consensus document which meant that it left a lot of language that was quite vague so nobody could feel pinned down. Article 76 is only a little over six hundred words long, but the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf labored mightily to produce about a hundred and thirty pages of explanation about what the words mean. I can tell you from personal experience that an investigator can look at a profile one day and say this is where the foot of the slope should be and then come back the next day and think maybe it should be somewhere else. It is a messy proposition.”
Collecting data in the Arctic is especially difficult. “Bathymetry and seismic rely on the transmission of sound data through water, but if your ship is crashing through ice you are degrading the quality of your measurements,” says Macnab. “Often you can’t go where you really want to collect data, you have to make detours, you have to run zigzag tracks around ice instead of a nice straight profile.”
So to get started, claimants need to overcome these difficulties and prove that they have accurately located the foot of the slope, the sediment thickness, and the location of the 2,500-meter line. With only 6 percent of the Arctic already mapped with advanced sonar techniques, there is a lot of basic bathymetry to do. That is the major part of the job where areas of seafloor are accepted to be a “natural prolongation” of the land. Much of the huge area of shallow sea that abuts Siberia and Alaska, and the narrower zones around Greenland and Canada, are obviously prolongations of the land but must still be accurately mapped to fix the borders. Along the way there can be some surprises.
Larry Mayer, director of the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping at the University of New Hampshire, is the United States’ number-one undersea mapmaker. He has created dramatic three-dimensional imagery of the seabed, using multibeam sonar which sends out a fan of sound to scan the ocean floor. The difference between the old-fashioned single-beam sonar, which just produces a series of dots, and multibeam is “like going from an outline of a face to a color photograph,” says Mayer. The U.S. Arctic mapping effort has repeatedly taken him out to the Chukchi Plateau and Northwind Ridge—extensions of the continental shelf off Alaska—on the icebreaker USCGC Healy. Out there, Mayer scored a territorial win for the United States when he found that the foot of the shelf was over a hundred miles farther north than previously thought. That will give the United States rights to thousands of extra square miles of Arctic seabed, once the Law of the Sea has been ratified.
There were plenty of other wonderful new sights too. One highlight was discovering a new undersea mountain, now named the Healy Seamount, almost two miles high and nine miles wide, out near the Chukchi Plateau. Elsewhere, the multibeam sonar provides stunning imagery of seabed features. There are long scour lines that have been made by giant icebergs dragging across the bottom, grooves cut by ancient ice sheets, and a couple of features that I had never heard of before including “pock marks,” scores of little craters where gas has bubbled up, perhaps from methane hydrates breaking down. Then there are “mud volcanoes.” Pressurized gas bursts through a muddy seafloor, throwing up a huge volcano-shaped mud structure that slowly collapses after the eruption is over.
Arctic geologists run into bigger problems and potential conflicts on the chains of ridges (the Gakkel Ridge, the Lomonosov Ridge, and the Alpha Mendeleyev Ridge) that lead out across the deeper Arctic. It is not so obvious that they are natural prolongations of adjoining land, but if they are, there’s a chance for a claim that runs far out across the Arctic.
The Gakkel Ridge is the easiest to deal with. It is the northern end of the better-known Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a great zipper in the earth’s crust that runs all the way down past Iceland to beyond the tip of Africa. Here convection currents deep within the earth bring fresh, hot magma up to the surface as the Eurasian and North American continents drift apart. Article 76 rules are clear for the Gakkel Ridge. This spreading ridge is “oceanic.” No one can claim it.
The Lomonosov Ridge is quite different and seems to be a huge fragment of continental crust left behind as the continents moved apart. It has turned and subsided over millions of years and now forms an underwater range of mountains, covered in layers of sediment, which stretches 1,100 miles right across the Arctic from Russia to where Denmark’s Greenland meets Canada’s Ellesmere Island.
The Lomonosov is a candidate to be a “natural prolongation” of land belonging to Russia, Greenland, and Canada depending on which end of the ridge you start from. There are difficulties with this: when the commission looked at the first Russian claim to the Lomonosov, the rumor is that it saw “morphological breaks” in the ridge, that is, dips in the ridge suggesting it was not linked to the land. “This raised the alarm in Canada and Denmark, too, because there are similar morphologies at the landward ends of the Alpha and Lomonosov ridges,” says Macnab. “What’s needed is to determine that there is geological continuity from the continent through to the ridge underneath that morphological break,” he explains. Researchers need to dive beneath the seabed and look inside the ridge to plumb its deeper structure. That involves some very loud bangs.
The Danes and Canadians joined forces in Project LORITA to work on their end of the Lomonosov. Landing on the ice by plane and helicopter they laid out 150 hydrophones at 1.3-kilometer (0.8-mile) intervals over a series of 200-kilometer (124-mile) lines. Under the ice they hung eleven “shots” per line, each holding 450–900 pounds of Pentolite high explosive that can send out sound waves penetrating 40 kilometers (25 miles) deep into the ridge below. Each shot could have demolished an entire office block. Mapping work continues and will determine how strong a claim the two nations have at their end of the ridge. The Russians are busy at the other end.
Further around the ocean, we run into the Alpha Mendeleyev Ridge, which is mysterious, little explored, and of disputed origin. When the Russians went ahead and claimed the ridge back in 2001, the United States objected immediately. The ridge, they said, is a “hot spot,” where plumes of magma from deep within the earth have intermittently produced volcanoes on the overlying crust above. The U.S. statement concludes that the ridge is “a volcanic feature of oceanic origin. It is not part of any State’s continental shelf.”
Russian scientists who used a whole battery of geological techniques to explore the ridge on a 2005 expedition do not agree. They say the evidence will show that it is a submerged block of continental crust and very much a natural extension of Russia. Canadians are reaching a similar conclusion from their end.
Mapping is continuing, submissions to the commission are not yet in, and any judgments are five to ten years in the future. Still it is possible to begin to work out what a future map of the Arctic might look like by listening to the scientific reports that the geologists presented at the International Geological Congress held in Oslo in August 2008. At a meeting like this, it is all science and no political intrigue. Macnab says that is the best part of his job. “Our governments and our authorities clash over some of these issues and these may lead to international disputes. But we develop real friendships,” he says.
Looking over the abstracts of their research, they certainly don’t seem to contain politically motivated exaggeration, just rather a lot of data.7 Those data show that every nation may have a reasonable claim on the ridges crossing the Arctic. “If those observations are believable,” says Macnab, “and I have no reasons to consider that they wouldn’t be, then to me that represents that we are looking at genuine prolongations of the land masses.” But the members of the commission may not agree with that, he cautions.
If all prove geologically sound, then Danish, Canadian, and Russian claims will overlap in the middle of the Arctic; American, Canadian, and Russian claims in the east and Norwegian and Russian claims in the west. Everyone will agree that t
here are two “holes,” areas to the left and right of the North Pole, which no one can reasonably claim as they are clearly beyond both those maximum limits. So the question of who owns the Arctic becomes one of how to settle geologically sound overlapping claims.
“The commission itself will not act as arbiter here,” says Macnab. “If there is a situation where the two countries can’t agree, the commission will hand it back to them and say, ‘You have to deal with it. It’s your problem. We are only looking at the technical aspect of your submissions, not the political ones.’”
Before guessing as to where that might lead and what the future political divisions of the Arctic will look like, it is worth asking what prize is really at stake.
The prize is not big or immediate. Most of the oil and gas basins of the Arctic lie in the 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zones. Further out there will be more hydrocarbons, but easier prospects will be available for at least fifty years. Deep in the Arctic there are likely to be gigantic methane deposits. Mining methane hydrates is still at the experimental stage. Mining subsea methane in remote and deep basins covered by seasonal ice is a very distant possibility. Fish are another resource, but rights to them come only if they live on the sea bottom. Within the EEZ there are exclusive rights to fish within the sea, but on the “extended continental shelf” rights are more limited. The bottom of a cold, deep ice-covered sea is not full of fish.
After the Ice Page 12