blog2007: U.S. Draws Map of Rich Arctic Floor ahead of Big Melt

U.S. Draws Map of Rich Arctic Floor ahead of Big Melt

COMMENT: We have long argued that the Arctic should be protected by international agreement. See The Polar Dash for Oil, http://www.sqwalk.com/blog2007/000936.html.

Instead, this article tells us that "In an era of climate change, these frozen assets are up for grabs, as melting ice allows detailed mapping and, one day perhaps, drilling."

Somewhat surprisingly, it is not the US that is leading the Arctic assault. It is Canada, Russia, Norway, and Denmark. Perhaps the US intends to assert its dominance later, extending "its undersea zone of military and economic authority" by military and economic means.

The tragedy is seeing this place jumped all over by would-be exploiters and imperialists. Nothing about global warming has changed these human, national and corporate impulses to control and exploit.

ROBERT LEE HOTZ
SCIENCE JOURNAL
Wall Street Journal
August 31, 2007

In the Arctic this week, researchers aboard the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Healy are mapping claims to the spoils of global warming.

North of Alaska, the 23 scientists of the Healy are gathering the data legally required to extend national territories across vast reaches of the mineral-rich seafloor usually blocked by Arctic ice. Fathom by fathom, multibeam sonar sensors mounted on the Healy's hull chart a submerged plateau called the Chukchi Cap, in a region that may contain 25% of the world's reserves of oil and natural gas.

North of Alaska, researchers aboard the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Healy are gathering the data legally required to extend national territories across vast reaches of the mineral-rich seafloor usually blocked by Arctic ice.

In an era of climate change, these frozen assets are up for grabs, as melting ice allows detailed mapping and, one day perhaps, drilling.

Rising temperatures thinned the ice pack to a record low this month. If current trends continue, the Arctic could become ice-free in summer months by 2040, polar researchers say.

Indeed, the Healy is finding easy passage this week through the Arctic Ocean's archipelagos of ice. "We have had a remarkable amount of open water -- good for mapping, sad for the Arctic," said expedition chief scientist Larry Mayer, reached aboard the Healy, the head of the University of New Hampshire's Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping.

The $1 million Healy expedition is the third U.S. seafloor-mapping venture into the Arctic since 2003, prompted by provisions of the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. The U.S. has never ratified the treaty but commissioned new seabed maps in case it ever is adopted. The U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee has set a hearing on the treaty next month.

Framed decades before the politics of the greenhouse effect permeated international relations, the U.N. treaty is taking on added importance in the Arctic as an arbiter for countries determined to come out ahead in a world transformed by rising temperatures. No country actually owns the North Pole. But with growing boldness this past summer, Russia, Denmark, Norway and Canada jockeyed for control of the Arctic seabed, galvanized by the prospect of open waterways there.

"A little bit of global warming and a little bit of adventurism and now we are really starting to explore the Arctic," said marine geophysicist Stephen P. Miller, head of the geological data center at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.

STAKING OUT THE NORTH POLE

As the polar ice cap melts, it seems like every nation wants a piece of the Arctic's mineral-rich seafloor. What do you think?2

The United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf7 lays out agreements and research about this aspect of the Law of the Sea.The U.N. treaty allows countries to extend their coastal economic zone up to 350 nautical miles offshore, depending on detailed technical evidence of undersea geology and topography. Under this provision, all four countries claim an underwater mountain called the Lomonosov Ridge that runs underneath the North Pole. They are depending on seafloor data to bolster their cases before the U.N. Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, meeting this week in closed session to consider claims.

The Healy's voyage is part of a broader U.S. effort to extend its undersea zone of military and economic authority should it adopt the 25-year-old U.N. accord.

For five years, the university's mapping teams, commissioned by the U.S. State Department, have been charting in unprecedented detail the deep ocean bottom of the Arctic, the Aleutian Islands, the Bering Sea, the Mariana Islands in the Pacific, the Gulf of Mexico and the U.S. Atlantic coast. "The better data you have, the better case you can make," said hydrographer Steven R. Barnum, director of the Office of Coast Survey at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which manages the effort.

Overall, maps of Mars are about 250 times better than maps of earth's ocean floor.

Until recently, the best global seafloor maps were based on altimeter readings by military satellites and submarine depth soundings gathered during the Cold War. Those miss anything smaller than six miles across. Two years ago, a Navy nuclear submarine rammed an undersea mountain that didn't appear on its charts, killing one sailor and wounding 23. The Healy's sonar sensors produce maps accurate to within about 20 yards.

Each new seafloor map is a revelation. "Every cruise turns up new discoveries," said NOAA scientist Andy Armstrong, reached aboard the Healy. The sonar sensors detected unsuspected seamounts, vast sea-slides and canyons. The data are freely available online.

All told, the undersea territories being mapped by the U.S. encompass an area larger than France. "It holds potential riches beyond your imagination" through sea-floor mining and drilling, said UNH marine geologist James Gardner, who has mapped 347,000 square miles of ocean bottom as part of the U.S. Law of the Sea project. In all, maps are being prepared for eight major extensions of U.S. seafloor authority, including several areas in the Arctic also claimed by Russia and, perhaps, Canada.

"It is a little overheated to say this is now a race to the Arctic," said John Bellinger, legal adviser to the U.S. secretary of state. "At the same time, we are very much aware that other countries, most particularly Russia, have been exercising their rights under the Law of the Sea Convention."

For now, the U.S. has no standing to protest.

Email me at ScienceJournal@wsj.com8.

STAKING OUT THE NORTH POLE