Institute For The Future

Claiming the North Pole

The receding of the Arctic ice is bringing a new territorial competition to claim the North Pole. In 2004, Danish scientists began to survey the area between Greenland and the North Pole, hoping to make a claim that "Greenland's continental socket is attached to a huge ridge beneath the floating Arctic ice," and should be treated as Danish territory.

More recently, Russia has announced plans "to annex a vast 460,000 square mile chunk of the frozen and ice-encrusted Arctic:"

 

According to Russian scientists, there is new evidence backing Russia's claim that its northern Arctic region is directly linked to the North Pole via an underwater shelf.

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....

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....

On Monday, however, a group of Russian geologists returned from a six-week voyage on a nuclear icebreaker. They had travelled to the Lomonosov ridge, an underwater shelf in Russia's remote and inhospitable eastern Arctic Ocean.

According to Russia's media, the geologists returned with the "sensational news" that the Lomonosov ridge was linked to Russian Federation territory, boosting Russia's claim over the oil-and-gas rich triangle.

 

This is part of a bigger competition between Denmark, Canada, Russia, Norway, and the U.S. to claim the Pole. Why are Arctic countries now starting to stake these claims? In the near term, it means control of the substantial energy reserves believed to be in the territory around the Pole (as the Guardian notes, the territory Russia plans to claim "contained 10bn tonnes of gas and oil deposits"). In the longer term, it will factor into control over the Northwest Passage that seems likely to open up as the polar ice caps continue to melt.

More broadly, this is a good example of how climate change could alter the dynamics of global conflicts. There's plenty of thinking recently on climate change and national security, revolving around the potential instabilities created by migration, conflict over resources, and the like. But it's also the case that some standing conflicts have been contained by local climate. One of my uncles, a now-retired Air Force officer, once told me that putting the Minuteman ICBM base in North Dakota helped stabilize the Cold War: you knew that your enemies were freezing too, and no one wanted to fight the Russians and a blizzard at the same time.

It's worth wondering whether there are conflicts today that will get worse if winters get shorter, say, or now-contested but inaccessible territories become easier to reach.