Arctic: New Claims for Extended Zones?

Arctic (global-adventures.us): After discovering a “… unusual underwater mountain on the Arctic sea floor,” the race is on again for Canada and the United States to renew claims that their boundaries extend beyond their existing 200-nautical-mile economic zones, granted under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Many countries including Russia have made claims in recent years to extend their territory since the Arctic sea is believed to be rich with oil and gas deposits.

For the past 8 weeks, U.S. and Canadian ships have mapped the ocean floor in an effort to find out how far the continental shelf extends. Early indications show more sediment buildup on the northern edges, so Jacob Verhoef, program director for Natural Resources Canada, hinting that the shelf and the countries' borders extend farther north. Verhoef said the ships collected 40 per cent more data than they expected and went more than 200 kilometers farther north than they anticipated.

While the ocean floor in the area surveyed has an average depth of 8,700 feet (2,636 meters), the 12 mile long and 24 mile wide mountain is almost 3,800 feet (1,151 meters) high. The underwater mountain in “elongated, more ridge-shaped and flat on the top," according to Canadian chief scientist David Mosher, who is part of the joint expedition.

The newly mapped ``seamount,'' along with the nearby discovery of what appears to be an extinct volcano buried in sediments some 500 kilometers northwest of Ellesmere Island, is described as a ``significant'' bonus on top of promising data collected.