Map of Lomonosov Ridge
Posted on 07/28/2007 8:22:50 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
July 28, 2007
Russia stakes its claim on North Pole in underwater search for oil
Tony Halpin in Moscow
Russia is making an audacious grab for the vast energy riches of the Arctic with an underwater mission to plant its flag beneath the North Pole.
A team of explorers plans to descend 4,300 metres (1,400ft) to the seabed in a miniature submarine tomorrow to stake Russia’s claim to an area of ocean the size of Western Europe. The polar expedition aims to prove that the Lomonosov Ridge, an underwater shelf that runs through the Arctic, is an extension of Russian territory.
The Kremlin has poured £40 million into the voyage, which is receiving blanket coverage on state television, to try to secure billions of tonnes of untapped oil and gas reserves under the ocean. Two members of the Duma, the Russian parliament, will plant the one-metre flag, made of titanium, during what will be the first manned journey to the seabed of the North Pole.
“This will be a truly historic dive,” Anatoli Sagalevich, chief of the Oceanology Institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences, told Itar-Tass. “The human eye has never seen the North Pole from a depth of 4,300 metres.”
Before the expedition left the northern port of Murmansk, Artur Chilingarov, 68, the expedition leader, said: “The Arctic is ours and we should demonstrate our presence.”
Mr Chilingarov is a deputy speaker in the Duma and president of the Association of Polar Explorers of the Russian Federation. His fellow submariner, Vladimir Gruzdev, said that the expedition would “remind the whole world that Russia is a great polar and scientific power”.
More than 100 scientists are on board the Akademik Fyodorov, Russia’s flagship research vessel, for what is the largest expedition yet organised to the Pole. A nuclear-powered ice-breaker, the Rossiya, is accompanying the ship.
Two deep-water submersibles will make three dives to the sea bed to try to confirm research by a Russian expedition in May suggesting that the Lomonosov Ridge is an extension of the Siberian continental shelf.
No country has jurisdiction over the Arctic, which is governed by the International Seabed Authority, but Russia has long sought to extend its territorial boundary. It lodged a demand for 1.2 million sq km (463,000 sq miles) of ocean in 2001 with the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which asked for more scientific data to support Russia’s case.
The expeditions are collecting data to back a fresh submission in 2009, the centenary of the first journey to the North Pole. At stake are vast reserves of oil and gas that are considered increasingly viable economically as climate change makes the Arctic less hostile to exploitation. Russian geologists argue that the area contains 10 billion tonnes of oil and gas, though some estimates put the total closer to 100 billion tonnes.
Russia’s claim to the North Pole is opposed by the four other Arctic countries — Canada, the United States, Norway and Denmark, through its sovereignty over Greenland. Under international law, each nation is entitled to control an economic zone within 200 miles of its continental shelf, but the limits of the shelf are disputed.
Denmark and Canada argue that the Lomonosov Ridge is connected to their territories and dispatched a joint expedition last year to bolster their claims. Stephen Harper, the Canadian Prime Minister, ordered a new fleet of patrol vessels last month, saying that they were needed to defend “our sovereignty over the Arctic”.
Russia’s determination to claim the territory poses particular problems for the US, which has refused to ratify the Law of the Sea Treaty governing disputes over exploitation rights, restricting its influence on the Arctic’s future.
This is not news. It is another news report. Several threads have scrolled by already and this news item should be appended to the original thread.
I hope they are successful in making this claim. They won’t listen to these environmental faggots (In the John Edwards sense) like US policy makers do. The result will be an increase in oil supply.
This is old news but I’m going to repeat what I said on the previous threads:
I’d rather the Russians get their hands on those resources than our own whacko environmentalists or the whackos in the UN. At least the Russians will sell them on the open market. At the highest price they can get, sure. But at least those resources will be available to us.
If the UN or the US took possession of them, we’d find a new endangered species or unhappy caribou or drowning polar bear cub once every 30 seconds or so.
The US obviously isn’t going after any oil anywhere so somebody else might as well have it. Tough noogies for us...
Point taken and agreed to.
However, I think Russia's claim to exclusive exploitation rights in international waters is a display of arrogance and a bad precedent if allowed to stand. The Russians could just exploit without an exclusive claim I would think...
The US needs to start training more artic warriors now. This will eventually lead to conflict with the US and Russia.
Are you a DNC worker promoting their agenda? ; )
You’re right technically, and legally, but I’m not so sure it’s a bad precedent.
With the UN trying to lay claim to the entire global seabed, it might be a GOOD precedent for individual states to just say no.
Don’t get me wrong. I trust the Russians to be consistently self-interested and actively anti-American.
But still, not as bad as the UN.
“The Dragon in the Sea” 1956 (also as “Under Pressure”)(also as “21st Century Sub”)
Story - a nuke sub stealing oil from an arctic pipeline. Old school Cold War novel with a strange resonance today.
Frank Herbert famous for Dune and the spin offs, a Navy man, he knew the sea. My favorite book of his is “Tactics of Mistake” and the book was on the reading list at one time for USAF NCOs.
I think Santa already works for the Chi-Coms.... ever notice where all the toys are made these days!?
The times has it wrong. 4,300 meters is 14,107.6 feet.
Map of Lomonosov Ridge
Have those "Drive-By" L.S.M.-clowns ever been right on anything???
what would be fun is getting into a DSV of our own and going down there to move their flag somewhere else...closer to Russia perhaps...
by the way, I call dibs on the moon with the US flag on it!
Subhead: Enviros silent on Russian plans to develop any field they find. Elsewhere, enviros protest attempts to drill in ANWAR.
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