Who owns the North Pole? Canada begins Arctic flights to find out
Forget about the Russian submarine — Canadian researchers plan to take to the High Arctic skies this weekend to begin gathering definitive data on who really owns the North Pole.
A specially equipped airplane is to launch flights from three remote northern airstrips to the top of the world to start mapping undersea ridges that will determine which Arctic nation controls that part of the seabed.
"We will go from the northern tip of Ellesmere Island and Greenland all the way up to the North Pole," Jacob Verhoef, the Natural Resources Canada geophysicist in charge of the joint Canada-Denmark project, said Monday.
The airplane — the only turbo-charged, ski-equipped DC-3 in the world — will be carrying instruments that measure minute changes in the strength of the earth's gravitational field.
Massive geological features such as mountains or undersea ridges create a slightly stronger gravitational pull. Charting those fluctuations will provide the best picture so far of the Lomonosov and Alpha ridges, which are the submerged features that define the limits of the continental shelf.
Under the terms of the United Nation's Convention on the Law of the Sea, the bottom of the shelf is where all Arctic nations start measuring the 200 nautical miles they can claim as territorial waters.
Russia has already claimed the pole for itself by using a tiny submarine in 2007 to plant a Russian flag on the ocean floor.
And last week, a retired Canadian scientist told reporters that preliminary data suggests the pole belongs to Denmark — an assertion repeated in the pages of the Copenhagen Post newspaper.
But Verhoef said there's still a good chance that Santa Claus will end up wearing a Maple Leaf. Existing data is old and sketchy, he said, and mostly cobbled together from occasional submarine transits.
"It's premature. There are areas of the Arctic where there is no … data for at least 100 kilometres."
The airplane is to collect much new information during its 200 to 250 scheduled hours of flight time. But Verhoef warns that even that data can only be regarded as a start.
The airplane's contribution is only regarded as supplementary evidence. The meat of Canada's claim on Arctic waters — an area equal in size to the three prairie provinces — will have to be based on direct measurement of the sea floor.
To that end, Verhoef said, the government is acquiring two miniature submarines of its own, the so-called autonomous undersea vehicles.
The unmanned, six-metre-long vehicles are scheduled for delivery next fall and should be deployed under the ice by spring 2010.
As well, Canadian scientists will soon be back camped on the ice north of Ellesmere Island to take painstaking measurements of one of the last unknown parts of the planet.
"We know more about the dark side of the moon than we know about lots of parts of the Arctic," Verhoef said.
Although much is made of the presumed riches under northern waters, jurisdiction over the pole is unlikely to bring any kind of resource bonanza with it.
The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the equivalent of 412 billion barrels of oil lies undiscovered underneath the sea ice and frigid water of the circumpolar Arctic.
But the majority of that lies just off the coast of Russia. Most of the rest lies on or near continental shelves, which are largely within existing jurisdictions.