The cold Arctic is a hot topic this summer. Last week, Russia and Norway agreed to split the resource-rich Barents Sea down the middle. Just a few weeks ago, Danish government documents leaked to the press indicated that in the next few years Denmark will make a formal claim before the UN for an area of seafloor that includes the North Pole. This comes just a few years after Russia actually planted its flag on the seafloor at the North Pole.

Beyond the symbolism of owning the top of the world, there's plenty of reason to bother with the North Pole. As the warming world pushes Arctic ice on its retreat, nations are looking to the north for the next economic frontier. Easy passage across the Arctic Ocean would cut shipping times (and create shipping lanes unencumbered by Somali pirates). Less ice also means an increased ability to launch research expeditions. And then there's what matters most for a seafloor claim like Denmark's: the possibility of finding oil and gas.

"We don't actually know what's down there yet," Ambassador David Balton of the U.S. State Department says. And we certainly don't know how we'll use it if anything is discovered. If it turns out that there natural resources underneath any newly claimed area that are worth going after, environmental groups and the mining industry are sure to fight over whether to use or conserve the seafloor.

Frozen Assets

The United States Geological Survey announced in 2008 that there could be 90 billion barrels of undiscovered oil in the Arctic and a similar trove of natural gas. These resources are primarily locked away in offshore sediment, much of which is already owned by individual countries. There are just five countries that, thanks to their land borders in the high Arctic, have any hope of tapping into the resources of the Arctic: Canada, Norway, the United States, Russia and Denmark (via Greenland). The referee between these five states is the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, a group administered by the United Nations. The Commission was set up under the Convention on the Law of the Sea, an agreement that set up international laws relating to the sea in general. Under Article 76 of the Law of the Sea, any coastal nation is entitled to up to 200 nautical miles of continental shelf, limited only by its borders with another coastal nation.

So far, that rule has been good enough—much of the Arctic oil and gas lies within 200 miles of the coast. But the 200-nautical-mile limit has created a no-man's land in the center of the Arctic Ocean, including the North Pole. That area still has plenty of unexplored seafloor, and deciding who can lay claim to it—and who gets to go after any potential oil and gas—means wading into the notion of the "extended continental shelf."

Mixing Geology and Geopolitics

The ambitions of nations aren't the only factor that makes it hard to sort out Arctic claims. The rules themselves are complex—and sometimes they rely on science, but sometimes they don't.

In geology, a continental shelf is the shallow, submerged area along a coastline, extending out to the sharp drop of the continental slope. But the legal definition of the continental shelf isn't constrained by reality. Any country is entitled to that 200 nautical miles of 'continental shelf,' whether or not the geologic feature actually extends that far. However, some countries found that they could actually use more seafloor area than the 200 nautical miles they were granted. Betsy Baker, a law professor at Vermont Law School, says that's when the commission created formulas so that countries could claim an "extended continental shelf."

This time, the formulas were at least partially grounded in geology. One says that a country can claim 60 nautical miles beyond the "foot of the slope" (the point at which the ocean floor rises rapidly toward the continent). A second formula says a country can claim an area up to the point where the thickness of the sediment on the ocean floor is at least 1 percent of the distance to the foot of the slope. So if a country wanted to claim an area that stretched 100 miles from the foot of the slope, the sediments 100 miles away would have to be one mile thick.

The countries can mix and match these formulas in order to claim the maximum area possible. But no country can claim an unlimited extended continental shelf. "You can't just go out an indeterminate distance, so there are limits" John Childs of the U.S. Geological Survey says. No country can claim seafloor that extends more than 350 nautical miles from its coastline, or 100 nautical miles from the 2500-meter isobath (a line that marks a depth of 2500 meters, or about 8200 feet).

Arctic Secrets

There's still a further complication: To find these reference points (foot of the slope, 2500-meter isobath), you've got to map the seafloor, a difficult undertaking in the icy Arctic Ocean. Multibeam sonar aboard icebreakers uses sound waves to measure the depth of the seafloor. Other ships with seismic equipment measure how sound waves reflect through the sediments on the ocean floor, which reveals the layers of rock beneath and the thickness of the different types of rock.

The data have yielded vast amounts of information about previously unexplored parts of the seafloor. Because of the political nature of the research, however, some nations are reluctant to publish their findings. After countries accumulate the data from their expeditions, they make a formal presentation to the commission, which judges whether or not they have enough data to make the claim scientifically valid. "The commission is [comprised of] scientists; their job is to evaluate the science presented to them," Baker says. But sticking to the science can be difficult when dealing with international politics.

The United States, so far, has not been shy about releasing its findings. "The shape of the seafloor is the shape of the seafloor, there's nothing secret about that," Larry Mayer says. Mayer is the director of the Center for Coastal Mapping at the University of New Hampshire and serves as a chief scientist aboard many of the expeditions to map the floor of the Arctic Ocean. But the U.S. also is not yet a party to the Convention on the Law of the Sea—it has yet to pass the Senate.

Mapmakers on the Front Lines

That hasn't stopped the United States from preparing for the fight over the future of the Arctic. The State Department heads up the Extended Continental Shelf Task Force, which coordinates with 12 other government agencies to define the Extended Continental Shelf for the United States.

Norway and Russia have already put their extended shelf claims before the Commission, with particular aggressiveness on Russia's part. The country first put a claim to the North Pole in 2001, but the commission decided that it needed more evidence. So the Russians completed more missions to the underwater Lomonosov Ridge over the next six years. In 2007, they tried to drive home the point: They planted a Russian flag on the seafloor at the North Pole.

It was quite the publicity stunt, Mayer says. Though it had no legal bearing, the flag incident ignited interest in the U.S. Extended Continental Shelf Project. When he and his team were jetting off from Boston's Logan airport on their first expedition post-flag, a woman approached him who wanted to know if he was going to protect the Arctic from the Russians. "I said, 'Yes, ma'am,'" Mayer says.

Arctic mapping isn't quite a Cold War conflict. Researchers from the different countries have an amicable relationship, Mayer says; the United States and Canada go on joint missions to gather data (despite the fact that the two countries have multiple maritime border disputes). "I think we all realize that it's so hard to map up there," Mayer says. They all know the difficulty of mapping the areas needed before the ice begins to close back in on the ships. So the attitude remains remarkably cordial for what is essentially a territorial dispute, and that's a good thing. "These nations . . . are not sending armies," Mayer says. "They're sending mappers."

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