Don Stowers, Editor-OGFJ
In one giant step backwards for mankind, the Russian government this summer asserted its claim to vast regions of the Arctic by planting its fl ag at the North Pole. President Vladimir Putin’s motive is painfully obvious – in an energy-starved world, he wants Russia to control much of the world’s future supply of hydrocarbons, some of which lie under the ice-frozen top of the world.
Melting ice in the Arctic has raised hopes of accessing energy reserves.Putin would like to restore Russian greatness and build an energy empire, but until this attempted land grab, he has confi ned his empirebuilding to taking control of corporations inside Russia and bullying such former Soviet republics as Ukraine that dare to elect candidates not favored by Moscow. With this move, he has opened the door for a resumption of the Cold War between Russia and the West.
The Arctic has long been regarded as an international zone administered by the International Seabed Authority. Each of the fi ve polar countries – Canada, Norway, Denmark (which administers Greenland), Russia, and the United States – controls a 200-mile economic zone along their coasts, but none of these zones reaches the North Pole.
The premise on which Russia bases its claim is that its continental shelf extends northward to the Pole. If it can produce scientifi c evidence that the Pole is a natural extension of its own territory, Russia believes it will have a valid claim.
Russian scientists say they have found an underwater ridge (the Lomonosov Ridge) that directly links their Arctic coast to the North Pole. This, Putin says, guarantees Russia’s ownership rights over a vast swathe of territory thought to contain oil, gas, and mineral reserves.
The Russian claim, which will be reviewed by the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf in 2009, has been challenged by other powers, including the US. The Lomonosov Ridge, asserts the US, is an underwater chain of mountains that runs through Greenland to Canada’s Ellesmere Island, which would tend to invalidate Russia’s position.
According to some estimates, the Arctic is home to a quarter of the world’s untapped energy reserves, which may become more accessible as global climate change causes increased melting of sea ice.
The Kremlin also wants to recover an 18,000-square-mile (47,000 square kilometers) section of the Bering Sea separating Alaska from Russia. The territory was ceded to the US in 1990 under the US-Soviet Maritime Boundary Agreement, but now Russian nationalists are demanding the return of the area, which is rich in sea life and hydrocarbon deposits.
If these claims sound as if they’re getting out of hand, they are. What’s next? Will Putin demand the return of another large territory that the US acquired from Russia in 1867 – the state of Alaska?
