N.S. scientist analyzing evidence of Canada's northern boundary limits

A scientist at Dartmouth's Bedford Institute of Oceanography is preparing for a busy couple of years as rocks plucked from the Arctic Ocean this summer are analyzed in an attempt to determine Canada's outer boundaries.

"It'll be a very busy new year with all the data, analysis and interpretation, but it's exciting too," said Mary-Lynn Dickson, director of the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) program with Natural Resources Canada.

"We've got all new data that people haven't seen before," she told Radio-Canada this week.

Dickson was chief scientist during a 47-day survey in the Arctic aboard the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Louis S. St-Laurent, along with 23 other researchers. 

Oil and minerals

Under international convention, countries have control over an economic zone reaching 200 nautical miles from their coasts. Arctic countries that can prove the outer limits of their territory extend under the sea floor can claim a larger area — and the oil and minerals potentially locked deep below the ocean's surface. 

Russia and Denmark have already made their submissions to the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, but Canada doesn't expect to complete the process until 2018 or 2019. 

The research team was able to collect more than 800 kilograms of rocks on the journey from Sweden to Nunavut, Dickinson said.

The Arctic is so understudied that some of the rocks are the only samples from an area one-third the size of Ontario, she said.

With the help of the Oden, a Swedish icebreaker, the group towed sensitive scientific gear through frigid waters and between broken slates of ice a couple of metres thick. 

800,000 square kilometres?

The rocks are being washed, photographed and sorted, and scientists will study them to learn their age and composition. 

Dickson had told CBC News in September that she expects Canada's claim in the Arctic to be somewhere between 500,000 and 800,000 square kilometres. For comparison's sake, Alberta is just over 660,000 square kilometres in size.

Dickson said this week there are bound to be overlaps in claims with other Arctic countries.

"And that's OK," she said. "All the Arctic Ocean countries have signed a declaration that we will resolve any overlaps in a legal framework, diplomatic framework peacefully in the future, but the first step is to get our submission into the commission."

Win for science

Dickson said she suspects some scientists will be invited to the Bedford institute in January to work out what sort of analysis should be done on the rocks. Eventually, Canada and countries that have done similar surveys will want to compare their findings, she said.

"It was a very successful cruise, not only for Canada's UNCLOS program, but for Arctic Ocean oceanography and science," she said.