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.

Toward a Canada-Russia Axis in the Arctic

Why Canada and Russia should unite to support a common position against the US in advancing certain Arctic claims

Michael Byers, Global Brief, February 6, 2012

Unlike the Antarctic, a continent surrounded by oceans, the Arctic is an ocean surrounded by continents. Most of the Arctic Ocean coastline belongs to the world’s two largest countries – Russia and Canada – each of which also owns territory on either side of a series of contested, and increasingly ice-free, Arctic straits.

Canada considers the Northwest Passage to be internal waters. Russia takes the same view of the Northern Sea Route. Both countries recognize that the thinning and melting of the Arctic sea ice pose environmental and security risks at the same time that they create economic opportunities in the form of increased shipping and access to natural resources. Both take the view that their domestic laws provide the best bases for protecting and developing their Northern coastlines. And both face a single, common source of opposition to their claims – namely, the US. All of this should beg the question: why have Russia and Canada not bolstered their respective positions by recognizing each other’s legal positions?

Russia, Canada neighbours? Seabed territorial push could bring borders together

Randy Boswell, PostMedia News, February 14, 2012

Two Canadian legal scholars have published a study showing how the push by northern nations for extended seabed territory in the Arctic Ocean could soon find Canada negotiating a maritime boundary with a new next-door neighbour: Russia.

Most of Canada's borderlands and boundary waters separate this country from the United States, including Alaska in the northwest corner of the continent. Canada also has maritime boundaries with Denmark (between Ellesmere Island and Greenland) and France, which oversees the tiny islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon south of Newfoundland.

But the possibility that Canada and Russia might one day share a border has, until now, seemed unimaginable given the vast ocean distances separating the two countries, and the relatively modest 370-kilometre (200-nautical-mile) offshore zone within which nations are permitted to exercise exclusive jurisdiction and resource rights.

But a recently revealed oddity arising from a Beaufort Sea boundary dispute between Canada and the U.S. — along with the advent of a UN treaty allowing countries to claim ownership over extended continental shelves lying beyond the current 200-mile limit — has highlighted how Canada and Russia could be on a cartographic intercept course somewhere north of 80 degrees latitude.

The surprising scenario is laid out in a lengthy article published this month in the academic journal Ocean Development & International Law and co-authored by University of British Columbia geopolitics professor Michael Byers, a leading Canadian expert on Arctic sovereignty issues, and his PhD student, James Baker.

Time to negotiate the Northwest Passage with the United States

Michael Byers, Policy Options, October 2011

It has always been difficult for Canada to discuss the Northwest Passage with the United States. A northern route to the Pacific Ocean was the holy grail for explorers from Cabot to Hudson and Franklin, whose discoveries helped define our nation. The Northwest Passage is also at the root of Canada’s most significant and enduring dispute with the United States. As such, it is a source of both pride and anxiety in our close but asymmetrical relationship. 

Nevertheless, we have managed to talk about the Northwest Passage when it has been necessary to do so ...

For the rest of the text, see: Time to Negotiate the Northwest Passage

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.

Peaceful competition on Arctic ice

Michael Byers, Toronto Star, 24 August 2011

AMUNDSEN GULF, N.W.T.—Two powerful icebreakers — one Canadian, the other American — have just met up in the Beaufort Sea, setting up the latest play in a circumpolar hockey game.

Together, the CCGS Louis S. St. Laurent and USCGC Healy will map the Alpha Ridge, a 2,000 kilometre-long range of underwater mountains running from the northwest flank of Canada’s Ellesmere Island toward Russia’s Wrangle Island.

Time, Canada, to negotiate the Northwest Passage

Michael Byers, CBC.ca , 5 July 2011

With Arctic sea ice melting, at up to three times faster than scientists were predicting, the international battle over the polar region and the Northwest Passage, in particular, is also heating up. This week Moscow sent a nuclear-powered icebreaker to explore the extent of its northern continental shelf while Canada announced that this summer's annual military exercise in the Arctic will be the largest in recent history.

UBC's Michael Byers, the author of Who Owns the Arctic? Understanding Sovereignty Disputes in the North, says it is time for the federal government to start formally negotiating the rules around the Northwest Passage with the international community, the Americans especially.

It's never been easy for Canada to talk about the Northwest Passage with the U.S. The passage was the holy grail for explorers from Cabot to Hudson and Franklin, whose discoveries helped define our northern nation.

The Northwest Passage also constitutes Canada's most significant long-standing dispute with the U.S. It's a source of both pride and anxiety in our close but asymmetrical relationship.

Expedition could solidify Canada's Arctic claims

Randy Boswell, PostMedia, May 31, 2011

A High Arctic mapping expedition this summer along a mysterious undersea mountain chain near the North Pole will mark the culmination of a 10-year federal research project aimed at adding millions of square kilometres of ocean floor -potentially an area as large as Canada's three Prairie provinces combined -to this country's territorial possessions.

U.S. sees Harper talk about Arctic sovereignty as empty politics

Prime Minister Stephen Harper drives an ATV at the Tuktoyaktuk airport while visiting Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories on the fourth day of his five-day northern tour to Canada's Arctic on Thursday Aug. 26, 2010. A new Wikileaks cable suggests the U.S. government views Stephen Harper's talk about Canadian Arctic sovereignty as little more than empty chest-thumping designed to win votes. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

Andy Blatchford and Bob Weber, The Canadian Press

A new WikiLeaks cable suggests the U.S. government views Stephen Harper's talk about Canadian Arctic sovereignty as little more than empty chest-thumping designed to win votes.

In a diplomatic cable posted this week by the online whistleblower, the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa says the Tories have made successful political use of promises to beef up Canada's presence in the Arctic.

But it says the Harper government has done only scant implementation on pledges like increasing surveillance over the Northwest Passage.

"Conservatives make concern for 'The North' part of their political brand . . . and it works," says the note, titled Canada's Conservative Government and its Arctic Focus.

UTC-built oxygen generator fails on U.S. submarine

By Andrea Shalal-Esa

ABOARD USS NEW HAMPSHIRE, Arctic Ocean | Mon Mar 21, 2011 

(Reuters) - The machine that produces fresh air aboard the USS New Hampshire submarine failed during a mission under the vast ice cap of the Arctic Ocean last week, prompting the submarine to use an alternate oxygen candle system instead.