Content area
Full Text
Despite the ungainly scramble for a slice of the Arctic's tantalising riches, no nation can master the region alone
THE Arctic has been a fashionable destination this summer. A team of Danish researchers, heading northwards on a Swedish ice-breaker, has just set sail from Norway. Meanwhile an American Coast Guard cutter, with a crew of scientists, has embarked on another expedition to map a giant swathe of ocean floor.
That was only this week's polar news. It came hard on the heels of a storming visit to Resolute Bay on Canada's northern extreme by Stephen Harper, the prime minister. He announced a new deep-water port and military training base, declaring that "the first principle of Arctic sovereignty [is] use it or lose it." Still more eye-catching--even if some of the footage shown on Moscow television really came from the film "Titanic"--was a Kremlin-backed voyage, which led to the planting, by a minisub, of a titanium Russian tricolour on the seabed.
Like any celebrity who is caught following the crowd, all the Arctic travellers insisted that their plans had been made ages ago and that the coincidence of so many polar expeditions was purely haphazard. Don't believe a word of it. What looks like an unseemly dash to claim great chunks of the Arctic--the sea, the ice, and whatever lies underneath--is precisely that. But why is it happening now? Clearly, the boom in energy and commodity prices has changed the economics of difficult searches for oil, gas and minerals. The steady shrinkage of polar ice-caps, as a result of global warming, is making previously inaccessible deposits much easier to get at--and helping to open some formerly icebound shipping lanes.
For all the historic resonance of Russia's flag-planting foray, the current dash to the Arctic is not--or at any rate, not yet--a simple race to create "facts on the ground" which can then be consolidated, and if necessary defended, by military power. It has more to do with the establishment of legal arguments, which have to be shored up by scientific data.
All the parties with a claim to a slice of the Arctic...