Arctic explorers return to hero's welcome in Moscow

Arctic explorers return to hero's welcome in Moscow 

MOSCOW: Russian explorers who planted a flag beneath the ice at the North Pole returned to a hero's welcome in Moscow on Tuesday and shrugged off foreign criticism of their mission.

"The Arctic always was Russian, and it will remain Russian," the expedition leader, Artur Chilingarov, said after arriving at Vnukovo airport near Moscow, where well-wishers brandished bottles of champagne and Russian flags.

"I am happy that we placed a Russian flag on the ocean floor, where no one has ever been before, and I couldn't care less what some foreigners say."

Russia wants to extend right up to the North Pole the territory it controls in the Arctic, believed to hold vast resources of oil and natural gas that are expected to become more accessible as climate change melts the ice cap.

A mechanical arm of a small submarine dropped a Russian flag on the Arctic seabed at a depth of 4,261 meters, or 13,980 feet, last week, staking a symbolic claim to the energy riches of the Arctic.

But the move has provoked criticism from abroad.

Foreign Minister Peter Mackay of Canada has said Russia was behaving like a 15th-century explorer. In Washington, a State Department spokesman, Tom Casey, said: "A metal flag, a rubber flag or a bed sheet on the ocean floor" did not have "any legal standing or effect on this claim."

In remarks broadcast on state television, President Vladimir Putin congratulated the team of explorers, saying "Your work was interesting, crucial, important for the country and not without risk."

But Putin, in more cautious remarks, also said the team's achievement would provide the groundwork for Russia's official position on who owns the Arctic Ocean seabed. "This, of course, must be discussed with our colleagues and be proven in international bodies," he said, according to the Russian media.

Canadian military heads North to show the flag on Arctic sovereignty

Canadian military heads North to show the flag on Arctic sovereignty

OTTAWA — The Canadian military began a 10-day "sovereignty operation" in the Arctic on Tuesday, just days after the government dismissed a Russian expedition to the region as "no threat to Canadian sovereignty."
 
The military operation, dubbed "Operation NANOOK 07," is a joint exercise involving 600 personnel from the navy, army and air force, as well as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Coast Guard.
 
From August 7 to 17, the troops and personnel will practise responding to two scenarios in and around Iqaluit, the Baffin Island coast, and the Hudson Strait. The first involves the Canadian Forces answering a call from the RCMP for assistance with a drug bust and the second will have the military helping the Coast Guard with an environmental protection event.
 
While the exercises are focused on those specific tasks, their very presence in the North will serve the greater purpose of protecting Canada's territory, the military said in a news release.
 
"Canadian Forces operations in Canada's North are an important dimension toward ensuring the protection of Canadian sovereignty," Lt.-Gen. Marc Dumais said. "Quite simply, these exercises allow us to turn our knowledge and skills into valuable experience." 

The operation comes as Prime Minister Stephen Harper sets out on a three-day visit to the North that ends in Iqaluit on Friday. It also follows the uproar last week when Russia planted its flag on the North Pole seabed.
 
Russia's dive below the Arctic waters is widely seen by observers as a symbol of its determination to claim a large chunk of the Arctic Ocean floor.
 
Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay described Russia's bold move as "just a show" of Russian bravado and "no threat to Canadian sovereignty."  But as MacKay downplayed the Russian expedition, Harper said it was another indication of the growing importance of the Arctic region and of Canada's need to assert its sovereignty over it.
 
In recent months, the Canadian government has been stepping up its focus on the Arctic. Harper recently announced a plan to spend $7 billion on the construction, retrofitting and maintenance of up to eight reinforced Arctic patrol vessels.
 
"Canada has a choice when it comes to defending our sovereignty over the Arctic," Harper said last month. "We either use it or lose it. And make no mistake, this government intends to use it."

Sentido.tv :: Economics :: Russian Mission to Claim Arctic Sea-bed in Bid to Drill for Oil, Gas

Sentido.tv :: Economics :: Russian Mission to Claim Arctic Sea-bed in Bid to Drill for Oil, Gas

RUSSIAN MISSION TO CLAIM ARCTIC SEA-BED IN BID TO DRILL FOR OIL, GAS
4 OTHER 'ARCTIC' NATIONS SAY MOVE IS MISGUIDED, FEAR RUSSIA TRYING TO UNILATERALLY ALTER MARITIME TREATIES
7 August 2007

Russia has launched an exploration mission to the North Pole, in an effort to plant a flag at the sea bottom and claim the land (and by extension the resources that lie beneath the sea-bed). Some of the world's most extensive reserves of natural gas and possibly petroleum are believed to lie beneath Arctic Ocean sea-bed.

Five nations border the Arctic Ocean, and each has laid out legal claims to part of the territory leading to the North Pole, though in legal and technical terms, the Pole is far enough from any actual continental land-mass to be well into international waters. At present, no international body manages the resources found at the bottom of the Arctic Sea, or their extraction or commerce relating to them.

Russia has put for the argument that according to studies of faultlines and major tectonic plates, the Arctic Ocean sea-bed is part of the continental shelf extending north from Russia, to the Pole. This would not actually place the resources under the sea at the open disposal of Russia, as territorial waters are not measured in this way out in the open sea.

Sergei Balyasnikov, a spokesman for the Arctic and Antarctic research institute that prepared the expedition, told the AP: "For the first time in history people will go down to the sea bed under the North Pole," adding: "It's like putting a flag on the moon." The comment is a clear reference to the pioneering American expedition to the lunar surface, and an attempt to assuage fears that Russia is conducting the expedition as a "land grab" as some have suggested.

According to CNN's reporting, "Russian scientists hope to dive in two mini-submarines beneath the pole to a depth of more than 13,200 feet, and drop a metal capsule containing the Russian flag on the sea bed."

The cable news service also adds that the Russian government is claiming 460,000 square miles of the Arctic shelf as Russian geological territory, in the hopes of securing as Russian resources the estimated 10 billion tons of oil and gas thought to be waiting for extraction under the sea-bed of the Arctic Ocean. [s]

Russia's Deep-Sea Flag-Planting at North Pole Strikes a Chill in Canada

Russia's Deep-Sea Flag-Planting at North Pole Strikes a Chill in Canada

TORONTO, Aug. 6 -- A dramatic submarine dive to plant the Russian flag on the seabed at the North Pole last week has rattled Canadian politics and underscored the growing stakes as the ice cap melts in the oil-rich Arctic.

Canada and the United States scoffed at the legal significance of the dive by a Russian mini-sub to set the flag on the seabed Thursday. "This isn't the 15th century. You can't go around the world and just plant flags" to claim territory, Canada's minister of foreign affairs, Peter MacKay, told reporters.

But the government here has been thrown on the defensive by the Russian action, accused by critics of doing too little to meet a deadline for the five Arctic nations to map and claim huge areas of the Arctic seabed.

A U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker left Seattle on Monday for an area 500 miles north of Barrow, Alaska, where a contingent of 20 scientists are to continue compiling an undersea map in preparation for a U.S. claim of the resources there.

Canada has not equipped itself to do the same. It has no icebreakers heavy enough to tackle the Arctic ice head-on.

In the view of opposition leader Jack Layton, head of the New Democratic Party, the government has responded with little more than rhetoric to threats to Canadian sovereignty in its frozen backyard. "Canada must move quickly and make immediate, strategic investments in its Arctic," Layton said Sunday.

The 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea gives each of the five Arctic nations -- Canada, the United States, Russia, Denmark and Norway -- 10 years after their ratification of the treaty to map out the Arctic seabed.

The maps, along with sediment samples and other scientific information, can be used to claim parts of the seabed that are extensions of the continental shelf of each nation. The claim would apply to the buried resources, not to the water above.

For years, progress under the international treaty was slow. The United States has not ratified the convention, though observers expect that to happen soon under the Democratic-controlled Congress. Global warming has added a sudden urgency to the process by thinning the Arctic ice cap, making drilling and shipping more feasible.

The potential rewards are great. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that 25 percent of the world's undiscovered oil and gas lies in the Arctic.

"The huge irony is that we are only talking about this because humanity has burned so much oil and gas that the ice is melting," said Michael Byers, an international law expert at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver . "It could be a vicious cycle: Climate change is opening up the Arctic to oil and gas drilling, which almost certainly will cause more climate change."

Russia, the first of the Arctic nations to ratify the treaty, has undertaken extensive mapping using its huge nuclear-powered icebreakers. Norway and Denmark have also conducted undersea mapping. Canada, which ratified the treaty in 2003, is cooperating with Denmark on the ice northeast of Ellesmere Island, setting off explosives to seismically map the ground under the Lincoln Sea region of the Arctic Ocean .

The United States has been mapping the Chukchi Cap area since 2003, according to Larry Mayer, director of the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping at the University of New Hampshire . That area is not expected to conflict with Russian claims, he said.

Mayer, who will join the icebreaker USCGC Healy as chief scientist, said the U.S. mapping effort will be greatly aided by sonar mapping done by U.S. Navy nuclear submarines that routinely cruised under the Arctic cap during the Cold War. That classified information has gradually been made public for scientists' use, Mayer said.

Canada historically has considered much of the North American side of the frozen Arctic its territory and bristles at U.S. claims that the thawing Northwest Passage through that area is an international strait. Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who is to tour Arctic communities this week, has called the Arctic "central to our identity as a northern nation."

But Canada has no northern deep-sea port and no submarines capable of traveling under the Arctic cap; its aging icebreakers were built for work on the Arctic's edges and in the St. Lawrence Seaway. It has a minimal military presence in the north and counts on the traditional presence of the native Inuit people to bolster its claims to the thousands of scattered islands that make up the Canadian archipelago.

Layton said Canada's larger problem is its failure to try to stop the warming that is opening up the Arctic. "Climate change policy is northern policy, and we have no time to waste," he said.

Study has bad news about sea level rise

Study has bad news about sea level rise 

A New Scientist article about a study by scientists at the institute of Arctic and Alpine Research of the University of Colorado, Boulder, has bad news for coastal areas around the world.

The team, led by Mark F. Meier, suggests in Science magazine that the latest International Panel on Climate Change projection of sea level rise in the 21st century by is too low by 10-25 centimeters because it leaves out the contributions of increasing glacier melt water.

To quote New Scientist , the IPCC report "predicted that sea levels worldwide will most probably rise between 21 and 47 cm by 2100, taking the averages of the six scenarios considered. Using the new figures on small glaciers, Meier calculates the rise to be between 27 and 97 cm.

"'This is an appreciable adjustment,' Meier says. He notes that more than 100 million people live within one meter of the current sea level."

Plastic duck armada is heading for Britain after 15-year global voyage

Plastic duck armada is heading for Britain after 15-year global voyage

A flotilla of plastic ducks is heading for Britain's beaches, according to an American oceanographer.

For the past 15 years Curtis Ebbesmeyer has been tracking nearly 30,000 plastic bath toys that were released into the Pacific Ocean when a container was washed off a cargo ship.

Some of the ducks, known as Friendly Floatees, are expected to reach Britain after a journey of nearly 17,000 miles, having crossed the Arctic Ocean frozen into pack ice, bobbed the length of Greenland and been carried down the eastern seaboard of the United States.

Mr Ebbesmeyer, who is based in Seattle, said yesterday that those that had not been trapped in circulating currents in the North Pacific, crushed by icebergs or blown ashore in Japan are bobbing across the Atlantic on the Gulf Stream.

Any beachcomber who finds one of the ducks will be able to claim a $100 (£50) reward from the toys' American distributor, First Years Inc.

The ducks began life in a Chinese factory and were being shipped to the US from Hong Kong when three 40ft containers fell into the Pacific during a storm on January 29, 1992. Two thirds of them floated south through the tropics, landing months later on the shores of Indonesia, Australia and South America. But 10,000 headed north and by the end of the year were off Alaska and heading back westwards. It took three years for the ducks to circle east to Japan, past the original drop site and then back to Alaska on a current known as the North Pacific Gyre before continuing north towards the Arctic.

Many were stranded as the currents took them through the Bering Strait, which divides Alaska from Russia. Mr Ebbesmeyer predicted that they would spend years trapped in the Arctic ice, moving at the rate of one mile a day towards the Atlantic.

In 2000, eight years after their journey began, the ducks were reported in the North Atlantic and in 2003, when they were expected to wash up on the east coast of America, First Years Inc announced the reward. By now the ducks had been bleached white by the sun and sea water. Sightings in the past two years have been scant, but oceanographers believe that their next port of call is southwest England, southern Ireland and western Scotland.

Simon Boxall, of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, said that the ducks offered a great opportunity for climate change research. "They are a nice tracer for what the currents are doing as they travel around the world, and currents are what determines our climate, and cycles of carbon.

"I would ask holidaymakers to keep an eye out, as they might be very few and far between by now. It's a real adventure story and the plastic should last 100 years, so we hope it will continue."

The landfalls have all been logged on a computer model called the Ocean Surface Currents Simulation, which is used to help fisheries and find people lost at sea. Two children's books have been written about the saga and the ducks have become collector's items, changing hands for £500.