ST. PETERSBURG – The scientist responsible for preparing Russia’s claim to seabed rights at the top of the world says Canada and his country are both poised to reap staggering economic benefits when a deal on who owns title to what in the northern ocean is finally struck.
“Canada has a wonderful shelf and basin, so of course Canada can get very rich from this,” said Victor Posyolov, deputy director of Russia’s Institute of World Ocean Geology and the head of its Arctic research program.
Poring over maps tracking the evidence that he is amassing for Russia’s claim, Posyolov estimated that his country, with the longest Arctic coastline, would gain rights to about 1.2 million square kilometres of seabed. He reckoned Canada would get about 800,000 square kilometres of sub-surface territory. That would be about twice as much seabed as the other claimants, Denmark and the United States, are likely to get.
“The biggest shelves and basins are in Canadian waters and it will benefit the most. The U.S. and Denmark have modest sectors,” Posyolov said in a room dominated by a circumpolar map that Canada and Russia jointly produced in 1992.
“We are not involved in studies of how much oil and gas may lie in the Danish, Canadian and U.S. sectors, but there is open data using different methods to make forecasts. Every country knows or imagines that there are reserves there.”
Much has been made of the potentially overlapping claims for the Arctic, but Posyolov foresees little possibility of conflict. There already is “an approximate plan for the division of the Arctic that is not in dispute,” the oceanologist said. It was based on the principle that exclusive economic zones extend out 200 nautical miles (332 kilometres) from each coastal state’s shoreline.
The grey area was beyond the 200-mile limit. To claim sub-surface rights beyond that point, a country has to prove that a geographic link exists between its land mass and adjacent underwater formations that may extend far out to sea. Much of the research pertains to a formation known as the Lomonosov Ridge, which snakes under the ocean for much of the distance between Russia, Canada and Greenland.
Based on standard geographic principles involving equidistance, Russia and Canada would likely agree to split the Lomonosov Ridge at or near its middle. Posyolov suggested it was far more likely that Canada and Denmark would have a difference of opinion over the ridge where it runs closest to Greenland and Canada’s Ellesmere Island.
Russia submitted a claim in 2001 to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, which makes recommendations about who is entitled to what. The commission asked Moscow to provide additional data for the Lomonosov Ridge and the adjacent Mendeleev Rise.
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