Who Owns the Arctic?

Canada's oil-sands bonanza could mean disaster for Alaska's coastline

Canada's disregard for the impacts of selling oil sands to China will lead to the near-inevitability of another Exxon Valdez-type spill in U.S. waters

Michael Byers, Special to the Seattle Times, May 18, 2012

Twenty-three years after the Exxon Valdez spilled more than half a million barrels of oil into Prince William Sound, another threat looms over Alaska's remote and beautiful coastline — in the form of heavy oil exports from Canada to China.

Lawmakers confronting cold reality for pricey icebreakers

The United States is running short of icebreakers, with its only pair of heavy icebreakers, Polar Sea and Polar Star, sidelined in Seattle, one with broken engines and the other undergoing an overhaul to keep it running a decade past its life span.

Kyung M. Song, Settle Times, October 9, 2011

WASHINGTON — Climate change is melting parts of the ice-locked Northwest Passage. China is building its first modern icebreaker in hopes of staking claims to Arctic waters. Frigid polar regions are opening up to increased shipping traffic, scientific exploration and tourism.

Yet the United States is so short of icebreakers capable of navigating those still-unpredictable waters that since 2007, it has made the annual supply run to McMurdo Station, the American research outpost in Antarctica, with a ship leased from Sweden.

The Inuit prepare to defend their rights

The Economist, March 3, 2011

Ottawa - WHEN in the Arctic, you should at least treat your host well. Royal Dutch Shell, an oil giant, had to learn this the hard way when planning to drill exploration wells in the Beaufort Sea off Alaska a couple of years ago. The firm had spent $84m on offshore leases and had satisfied regulators. But it failed to win over the Inupiat, an Inuit group. They worried that icebreakers and drill ships would hurt the bowhead whales on which they depend. Their leaders and environmental groups sued American regulators for not following a 1970 law on environmental impacts. This allowed them to wrest a number of concessions from Shell, including a commitment to stop all offshore operations during the bowhead migration and hunt, should drilling ever proceed.

Dispute over Hans Island nears resolution. Now for the Beaufort Sea

John Ibbitson, Globe and Mail, January 27, 2011

Negotiators are now confident that Canada and Denmark will resolve their dispute over Hans Island, and sooner rather than later.

Relations between the two countries have grown irritable at times in recent years because of their competing claims to the barren bit of rock perched halfway between Ellesmere Island and Greenland. Also in dispute is a patch of the Lincoln Sea even farther north.

But the two countries are in negotiations and have embarked on a joint mapping exercise, and both Canadian and Danish officials, speaking on background, said they were confident of reaching an agreement before Canada deposits its claim over the Arctic seabed to the United Nations in 2013.

Shared jurisdiction of the island is one possibility; another is running the border down the middle of the uninhabited, 1.3-square-kilometre knoll, which would give Canada a land border with Denmark.

As Arctic melts, U.S. ill equipped to tap resources

By Jacquelyn Ryan, Washington Post, January 10, 2011 

KODIAK, ALASKA - Flying over the Arctic Circle, the Coast Guard C130 rumbled as it alternated between 500 and 2,500 feet, its high-tech equipment quietly observing the thickness and stretch of ice along Alaska's northern border.

Cold air rushed through the open cargo door as some musk oxen and the occasional walrus passed below.

Like the rest of the 2.5-million-square-foot area at the top of the world, this chunk of the U.S. Arctic is melting quickly because of accelerated climate change. The prospect of newly thawed sea lanes and a freshly accessible, resource-rich seabed has nations jockeying for position. And government and military officials are concerned the United States is not moving quickly enough to protect American interests in this vulnerable and fast-changing region.

Shell Pushes Forward To Drill Well In Arctic

 

Jeff Brady/NPR

Shell's Nanuq was built especially for oil spill response cleanup in the Arctic Ocean. It can store 12,000 barrels of recovered oil. The 300-foot vessel is docked at Dutch Harbor, Alaska, for the winter.

 

Jeff Brady, National Public Radio, December 24, 2010

The Deepwater Horizon accident last April put a halt to offshore drilling — not just in the Gulf of Mexico but in Alaska, too. Despite that, Shell is pushing ahead with plans to drill an exploratory well in the Arctic Ocean, in the Beaufort Sea off the north coast of Alaska.

The company has spent more than $3.5 billion on federal leases and preparations to drill in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas. So far, that investment hasn't returned a single dollar.

Lawsuits by environmental groups and Alaska native communities forced the company to scale back drilling plans in the Chukchi. Now, Shell is focused on an exploratory well in the Beaufort. The company hopes to drill this summer after the ice clears.

Canada Burnishes Its Position as Arctic Power

As Northern Passageways Become Navigable and Mineral Wealth Beckons, 

Leaders Boost Claims With Expeditions, Sorties

Phred Dvorak, Wall Street Journal, August 31, 2010

The Canadian government on Monday announced that it had failed, in a small Arctic expedition it mounted last week, to find the remains of two British ships that disappeared more than 150 years ago seeking the fabled Northwest Passage.

The trip had more than historical relevance: It marked the latest move in a bigger geopolitical game—Canada's ambition to burnish its position as an Arctic power.

US-Canada Arctic border dispute key to maritime riches

The two countries have conducted previous joint surveys in the Arctic area

Sian Griffiths, BBC News, Ottawa, August 2, 1010

Canada and the United States are beginning a five-week joint Arctic survey, part of which will take place in a section of the energy-rich Beaufort Sea that is claimed by both countries.

Work underway to resolve Beaufort Sea boundary dispute

By Randy Boswell, Postmedia News July 26, 2010

 

Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Louis S. St-Laurent (top) and the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Healy working side-by-side in the summer of 2009 during a seabed survey in the Beaufort Sea.

Photograph by: U.S. Geological Survey, Photo Handout

Canadian and U.S. government experts met quietly in Ottawa last week to begin trying to resolve a long-standing boundary dispute in the Beaufort Sea, a Canadian diplomat revealed Monday.

News of the surprise talks was disclosed during a briefing by Canadian and U.S. officials on a bi-national seabed mapping mission to be conducted next month in the Beaufort region.

This summer's joint Canada-U.S. survey, the third consecutive year in which researchers from the two countries have agreed to collaborate on mapping the Beaufort sea floor, will also include a sonar probe of the contested area itself for the first time.

The Ottawa talks on the Beaufort controversy, held July 22, followed a pledge earlier this year by Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon that Canada intends to actively pursue an agreement with the U.S. over where the maritime boundary should be drawn in an unresolved, Lake Ontario-sized section of the Arctic Ocean north of the Yukon-Alaska border.

Canada ready to settle Beaufort Sea dispute with U.S.: Cannon

Randy Boswell, CanWest News Service, May 14, 2010

Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon has issued an open invitation to the U.S. to begin serious negotiations with Canada to end their decades-old territorial dispute in the Beaufort Sea — a development hailed by one of Canada's leading Arctic experts as a "clear" and "important" push to quickly settle the maritime boundary between the two countries ahead of potential offshore oil and gas development.