Russia claimed north pole

T

Troika

Junior Member
Jeff Head said:
As I said in a later post, having read up on it somewhat now myself, apparently, under international law, no country owns the North Pole. Instead, the five surrounding Arctic states, Russia, the US, Canada, Norway and Denmark (via Greenland), are limited to a 200-mile economic zone around their coasts.

According to Russia, they now have announced the "sensational news" that the Lomonosov ridge was linked to Russian Federation territory, boosting Russia's claim over the oil-and-gas rich triangle. The territory contains 10bn tonnes of gas and oil deposits, the scientists said.

Russia's Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper celebrated the discovery by printing a large map of the North Pole. It showed the new "addition" to Russia - the size of France, Germany and Italy combined - under a white, blue and red Russian flag.

Many scientists doubt whether Russia's latest Arctic grab will stand up to scrutiny...and I do too.

To extend a zone, a state has to prove that the structure of the continental shelf is similar to the geological structure within its territory. Under the current UN convention on the laws of the sea, no country's shelf extends to the North Pole. Instead, the International Seabed Authority administers the area around the pole as an international area.

"Frankly I think it's a little bit strange," Sergey Priamikov, the international co-operation director of Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in St Petersburg, told the Guardian. "Canada could make exactly the same claim. The Canadians could say that the Lomonosov ridge is part of the Canadian shelf, which means Russia should in fact belong to Canada, together with the whole of Eurasia."

I do not think it will stand the light of day. Again, IMHO, it is a political effort...and just a round about way to bolster more Russian claims to the resources.
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I don't think you read what I wrote, instead repeating what you wrote.

You are correct in stating that the seabed is currently owned by no one, and administered (such as that term has any meaning for frozen hell under freezing water) by the international seabed authority, but there are provisions for claiming it if seabed geological features were to support it.

That is why after 2001 claim of Lomonosov Ridge, Russia was told to provide more evidence that it is extension of Russian continental shelf, as opposed to, that it is not valid whether the Ridge is an extension of continental shelf or not. That is also why Denmark and Canada provided contradictory claim that certain ridge features are extension of Canadian and Greenlander continental shelf respectively. There would be none of this hullabaloo if the agreement does not lend credence to this interpretation.

Priamikov is partially correct. The Canadians can and did claim that Lomonosov Ridge is an extension of their continental shelf as opposed to Eurasian one, and if their claim were to prove stronger under impartial objective geological study, then they would indeed have stronger claim. What he said afterwards, makes no sense. Russia, and the rest of Eurasia, already has prior claims, and all of it is official recognized territory of one state or another, a state of affairs that is not true of Arctic and present Russian claims.

The flag-planting itself is, however, just a gesture and has no impact on the claim itself, so in that sense we are in agreement.
 
N

Norfolk

Junior Member
VIP Professional
planeman said:
We could give Belgium o the Russians as trade for this territory? It sounds like a fair swap to me.
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Unless you're Belgian.

Right now, the controversy over Russia's claims to the continental shelf is largely academic, but the claims themselves may not be so academic in the future. Their present utility may have more of a PR element than anything else, but given that Russia's attempts to climb back to great power status are being financed by petroleum and gas receipts, and the 7- or 8-year, $192 billion rearmament program the Russian government has embarked upon (with 6 50,000 ton nuke carriers, amongst other things) means Russia not only has to squeeze every red cent that it can out of existing reserves, but secure as much in the way of future reserves as it possibly can.

The Russians are claiming that "their" new "territories" under the Arctic Ocean contain ~80% of the petroleum deposits in that ocean. They may be looking for PR value now, but they are also looking for future sources of income to sustain their return to great power status. The Russians are very serious about this, and it would be ill-advised to dismiss this as a simple stunt. This could cause real grief in coming decades if things aren't handled just right.
 
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