Fight for the Top of the World

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The Arctic

It's one thing to covet the resources that may now be accessible in the Arctic. It's another to establish a legal claim to them that others will recognize. Under the provisions of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), a country has exclusive economic rights to the sea's resources within 200 nautical miles (230 miles, 370 km) of its coast. The treaty provides for extending that limit up to 350 nautical miles if a country can prove that its continental shelf extends from the coastline beyond the current limit. That explains the rush by Russia, Denmark and Canada to try to use the murky form of the underwater Lomonosov Ridge to expand the territory they control. The ridge, a largely uncharted geological formation named for an 18th century Russian polymath born near the northern coastal city of Arkhangel'sk, runs under the Pole from north of Canada's Ellesmere Island and Denmark's Greenland to the New Siberian Islands of Russia. Each of the three countries hopes the ridge's contours and rock content will throw up proof that it is an extension of the continental shelf rather than a strictly deep-ocean formation.

It was with an eye to bolstering Moscow's claims that Artur Chilingarov, a member of Russia's parliament, enlisted fellow parliamentarian Vladimir Gruzdev and the commander of the Mir 1 submersible, Anatoli Sagalevich, for last month's aquatic assault on the North Pole. With the funding (and presence aboard) of a Swedish millionaire and an Australian adventure-tour operator, the expedition trailed an icebreaker to the pole, where Sagalevich piloted one of two submersibles to a depth of 13,100 ft. (4,301 m), planted the Russian flag and then skillfully resurfaced through the shifting holes in the ice. Chilingarov said the flag was to "stake the place for Russia," although, in truth, Russia is already a dominant force in the Arctic; it has the world's largest fleet of icebreakers and long experience developing its icy northern coastline.

Chilingarov and his team were given a heroes' reception in Moscow and an audience with President Vladimir Putin. But the Russians' adventurism also set off an irritable and predictable backlash. Canada's then Foreign Minister Peter MacKay dismissed the Russian effort as a "show." "This isn't the 15th century," he said. "You can't go around the world and just plant flags and say, ‘We're claiming this territory.' " In Washington, Ariel Cohen of the Heritage Foundation said, "Russia's attempted grab is a cause for concern" and called on the U.S. government to "formulate a strong response."

Sagalevich professes bafflement. "I don't really know why some people got so nervous about [our] placing the Russian flag there," he told TIME. "The Americans placed their flag on the moon, and it doesn't mean the moon became theirs." The Russian acknowledges that though the mission "excited the whole world," it amounted to only a "pinprick" in Moscow's continued efforts to undergird its case for extended sovereignty in the Arctic. (In 2002 a U.N. commission shelved Russia's claim to more of the Arctic for lack of detailed technical evidence.) Nor, despite this summer's bravado, is it clear that Russia has real plans to follow up the Mir expedition. Robert Nigmatulin, director of the Institute of Ocean Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences, says establishing a claim to the continental shelf before 2009 — as Russia must do under the terms of the unclos — would require drilling deep-water seabed samples, technology that he says Russia does not possess and is not inclined to pay for.

In any event, it is hardly as if Russia were the only nation to see the Arctic as a place to burnish national pride. The Norwegians have their new gas field, and Denmark is pursuing proof of its own claims just as doggedly as the Russians — though in a more consensual, Scandinavian mode. The Danes enlisted both a Swedish and a Russian icebreaker for its expedition to the largely uncharted waters north of Greenland to document what Science Minister Helge Sander refers to as "our hopefully justified claim of a continental shelf from Greenland toward the North Pole." The Danes know that scientific inquiry alone will not determine who gets what in the north. "When we are talking resources, we are also talking politics," says Sander, who predicts that the demarcation of rights to the Arctic will end with a "dogfight at the International Court of Justice in the Hague."