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At the time, experts from the Geological Survey of Canada and Canadian Hydrographic Service estimated that as much as 1.75 million square kilometres of seafloor to the east and north of Canada’s 9.9-million-sq.-km. land mass — initially described as an area “equivalent to the size of the three Prairie provinces” — might eventually be claimed under provisions of the new international accord on continental shelf extensions, a component of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, or UNCLOS.

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Canada’s Pacific Coast, with its “narrow margin” continental shelf and steep slope to deep ocean, generally doesn’t meet the UN criteria for territorial extensions beyond the economic zone.

But now, after years of seafloor surveys covering thousands of kilometres of the Atlantic and Arctic oceans — along with countless hours spent analyzing the collected data — the head of Canada’s UNCLOS mapping project is preparing the country’s final submission to acquire new offshore territory ahead of a December 2013 deadline for the claim.

And Jacob Verhoef, the Halifax-based Natural Resources Canada geologist directing the historic effort to redraw the outer boundary of Canada, says the final proposal is proving “pretty close” in size to what federal scientists predicted nearly 20 years ago.

“I can’t give you a number, simply because I don’t have a number – we have not calculated the number. But our preliminary outer limit as we are now defining it is pretty close to what we had expected,” Verhoef told Postmedia News.