Would that the question posed was "who owns or claims to own Antarctica"? The answer is, by international agreement, no one. The Arctic, however, is a much different story where eight nations, Russia, Canada, the United States, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland and Finland all have a stake in the Arctic's icy real estate.
Growing up in Canada, I had no doubt that the Arctic belonged to us. Weren't the "great north strong and free"? No one thought of the Arctic as involving other countries. Except the US and Alaska and they were our pals, were they not?
Since 1925, Canada has claimed the portion of the Arctic between 60 W and 141 W [longitude, extending all the way north to the North Pole]: all islands in this region are Canadian territory and the territorial waters claimed by Canada surround these islands. No one knew why we had done this but we had.
Claims of other nations to Arctic resources were rather tepid until the lure of huge oil and mineral deposits presented itself. And, what a lure! It's been estimated that the Arctic region holds between 100 and 200 billion barrels of recoverable oil, and approximately 2000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
Then came another shocker which cast doubt upon Canada's claim that Arctic Canada was theirs for sure - global warming opened up the Northwest Passage and put an unexpected chip in America's pile.
A little background. In 1985, the U.S. icebreaker Polar Sea passed through the Passage from Greenland to Alaska, without seeking Canadian permission creating a contretemps which resulted in a 1988 agreement, called "Arctic Cooperation", which, significantly didn't solve the sovereignty issue. To George W. Bush, at any rate, these were international waters as he asserted U.S. military "sea power" over the oil-rich Arctic. If the Passage is not an internal waterway it raises for Canada the critical question as to whether its jurisdiction over Arctic resources can be trumped by the United States "sea power" in "international waters". So much for our pal!
When, in 2007 Russia famously planted its flag under the North Pole, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said
"It is our time to shine! Canada has taken its sovereignty too lightly for too long" and in a masterpiece of understatement said "I think the recent activities of the Russians are another indication that there's going to be growing international interest in this region."
Canadian Foreign Minister Peter Mackay weighed in thusly: "This isn't the 15th century. You can't go around the world and just plant flags and say 'We're claiming this territory. There is no threat to Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic ... we're not at all concerned about this mission - basically it's just a show by Russia."
Russia had, however, firmly thrown the fat into the fire and sovereignty over the Arctic became a deadly serious issue
There are basically two arguments with endless sub-arguments.
The "sector" principle, where the claimant extends its territorial claim to the North Pole in pie shaped territories meaning that countries bordering the Arctic would get pieces of "pie" extending their jurisdiction longitudinally to the Pole. One can only imagine how such lines could be agreed upon.
When nothing much turned on it, the sectoral argument seemed reasonable. Despite Canada's reliance upon the sector theory for its Arctic claims as late as the 1980s, support for the theory among other Arctic nations was virtually non-existent. While the 1959 Antarctic Treaty was based upon the sector theory, the governments of the Soviet Union, Denmark, Norway and the United States were consistently opposed to its application to matters of Arctic delimitation. The lure of great natural resources has, however, brought in the "continental shelf" argument which renders the sectoral argument moot. The argument has shifted to claims that undersea extensions of a country's continental shelf give sovereignty with, as always, the devil being in the details as to how the lines are drawn
A year after Russia planted its flag on the North Pole seabed it claimed control over a vast undersea mountain chain stretching across the Arctic Ocean from Siberia to Ellesmere Island and Greenland - not to be outdone, Canadian and Danish researchers have teamed to claim that this chain is a natural extension of the North American continent. (This "continental shelf" argument has led to a spat between Denmark and Canada over tiny, uninhabited Hans Island situated between Canada's Ellesmere Island and Greenland.)
The game's a-foot! The process of settling this issue is the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Seas to which the US is not a signatory though it's working through their auspices. I have a deep suspicion, warranted by history of United States refusing to accept inconvenient international law, that if the United States feels that it isn't getting all it's entitled to, it will refuse to deal. It then becomes another very large, bone of contention between Russia and America which not only affects national pride but involves huge petroleum resources. The world doesn't need any more Russo-America bones of contention.
Are the eight negotiating nations considering the environmental issues plaguing the world? How do countries convince their people to move away from fossil fuels when the US and Russia are nose to nose, nuke to nuke, trying to get more of the stuff the world is trying to get along without? How can any pressure be brought to bear on China to clean up its act when the other big kids on the block are doing all they can to extend the reign of King Petroleum?
One thing is clear - the more governments claim virtuous goals such as attacking global energy, the less likely they are to keep their promise. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, "the louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons".
If governments applied this simple test - will the world be better off if these resources are exploited? - they would back off. With former US President Bush talking of "sea power" and Russian President Medvedev saying "Our first and main task is to turn the Arctic into a resource base for Russia in the 21st century," tension will be added to the considerable quantity of that which already exists, and global warming will continue to be a shallow, cynical political promise.
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