Canada poised to claim ownership of vast underwater territory bigger than Quebec
Randy Boswell, Postmedia News
Last Updated: Oct 5, 2012
OTTAWA – Canada is poised to claim ownership of a vast new expanse of undersea territory beyond its Atlantic and Arctic coasts that’s greater in size than Quebec and equal to about 20% of the country’s surface area, Postmedia News has learned.
The huge seabed land grab has been in the works since 1994, when federal scientists first conducted a “desktop study” of Canada’s potential territorial expansion under a new UN treaty allowing nations to extend their offshore jurisdictions well past the current 200-nautical-mile (370-km) limit of so-called “Exclusive Economic Zones” in coastal waters.
But the UN also set strict criteria for converting underwater tracts of “no man’s land” into a nation’s territorial possessions, including exhaustive geological studies proving these distant stretches of seabed — including potentially massive oil-and-gas deposits — are “natural prolongations” of each applicant country’s continental bedrock.
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.
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.
National Post Graphics
“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.
At the time of the country’s initial estimates, “we didn’t have enough data to substantiate it, so we could not formally define it,” he added. “Now, with all the data sufficient – and now the analysis of the data (nearing completion) – there are differences from what we originally expected, but nothing major.”
That news will be music to the ears of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who has touted Arctic mineral wealth and Canada’s offshore resources as a vital economic inheritance for the nation. And despite inevitable controversies over the prospect of exploiting offshore oil, natural gas and frozen methane deposits — especially in the remote and ice-choked waters of Arctic Canada — the UNCLOS mapping project was strongly supported by previous Liberal governments as well.
The claim document now being prepared under Verhoef’s supervision, which he said will run into the “thousands of pages” and encompass at least 25 separate scientific reports, must be delivered to the UN agency handling submissions by the end of next year, 10 years after Canada ratified the UNCLOS convention and initiated its seabed mapping mission in 2003.
An executive summary of the submission and a cartographic representation of the claim – essentially the first map of the proposed new Canada – are now being prepared for public release sometime next year, Verhoef added.
Other countries have already been granted control over great swaths of seafloor using the UN formula. In April 2009, Norway formally acquired about 235,000 square kilometres of undersea Arctic and Atlantic territory.
And in 2008, Australia added an underwater area equal to one-third of the country’s land mass — about 2.5 million square kilometres, or the combined areas of Ontario and Quebec — to its governing authority.
“This is a major boost to Australia’s offshore resource potential and also to our ability to preserve the marine environment on the seabed,” the country’s resources and energy minister, Martin Ferguson, stated at the time.
“The largest island in the world has just been dramatically increased in size,” Ferguson added after UN approval of Australia’s claim. “This is potentially a bonanza.”
The case for gaining possession of undersea territory can be clinched in one of two ways. Countries can claim seabed anywhere they can prove that the continental shelf extends underwater from existing territory — such as the northern mainland and Arctic islands in Canada’s case — until the seabed drops consistently below a depth of 2,500 metres.
The other approach involves measuring offshore seabed sediment — such as the enormous deposits of silt accumulated at the bottom of the Beaufort Sea, discharged from the outlet of the Mackenzie River — and claiming continental extensions under a complex UN formula calculated from the thickness of those deposits and their distance from shore.
Earlier this year, Verhoef told Postmedia News that three scholarly papers had been published in support of Canada’s undersea land claims — an important credibility-building exercise when it comes to demonstrating the soundness of Canada’s eventual UN submission.
One published article was about the Alpha Ridge — a submerged mountain that extends 1,700 kilometres from Canada to Russia past the North Pole.
One of the other papers concerned the Lomonosov Ridge, another undersea mountain range that federal scientists believe is an extension of North America running from Greenland and Ellesmere Island to the Siberian side of the Arctic Ocean.
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