ht: National Newswatch
The federal scientist heading Canada's bid to claim thousands of square kilometres of Arctic Ocean seabed under a UN convention says a joint United States-Canada mapping mission to the Beaufort Sea this fall yielded "very promising" results that could vastly extend this country's territory in one of the polar region's richest target zones for offshore oil and gas.
"The quality of the data is astonishing," Halifax-based geoscientist Jacob Verhoef says. "We haven't analysed it all, but what we found is that the entire Beaufort Sea -- all the way up to the north -- is covered with significant amounts of sediments, which makes our case look very promising."
Under rules laid out in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, Canada's claims for extended undersea jurisdiction in the Western Arctic hinge on the thickness of sediments deposited on the ocean bottom over tens of thousands of years by the Mackenzie River, which discharges millions of tonnes of silt annually into the Beaufort near the Northwest Territories-Yukon border.
Arctic Ocean currents then carry the sediments far beyond the mainland shore of northern Canada, depositing them along the way in seabed layers of hardened muck that are now hundreds of metres thick: enough, potentially, to constitute a legal extension of mainland Canada under convention rules.
Betcha Darth Putin will deny this. What'll he do, invade and occupy Canada for her oil and gas, plus for her being next door to the US? Betcha he'd like to do that... but he sure better not! He should accept the truth and shut up already about his delusional, imperialistic claim to the Arctic.
I can just see the look on his face after he hears the news...
Not, however, that I actually trust the UN to accept the truth... they might favor Putin's claim instead, as, after all, the UN is corrupt and effectively controlled by evildoers like Putin!
