Divide or conquer
As Arctic sea ice slowly thaws, five states are asserting rights to sections of the underlying seabed. The claimed resource-bearing areas are huge - and partly overlapping.
On August 2, 2007, three researchers dived under the thick ice at the North Pole in a mini-submarine, extended a robotic arm to the seabed at a depth of 4300 meters and rammed a titanium Russian flag into the sediment there. Back on the surface, expedition leader and member of parliament Artur Chilingarov proudly said: "If someone goes down where we were in 100 or 1000 years, they will see the Russian flag." President Vladimir Putin congratulated the team by phone.
Canadian geophysicist David Mosher was unimpressed when he heard the news in his office at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Nova Scotia. He is looking at a small cylinder of dried, compacted mud in the shape of a sausage. This is a short piece of a 13-meter-long sediment core that was taken from the same seabed at the North Pole - in 1991, when the then doctoral student Mosher was traveling together with 40 scientists from different countries on two research icebreakers from Germany and Sweden and they were the had sampled. "We made the hole so the Russians could put up their flag," Mosher quips.
Their political action was intended to boost morale in Russia, which was going through a deep recession. However, the blunt claim to the North Pole signaled to the other four countries bordering the Arctic Sea that it was high time they formally claimed their rights to the Arctic seabed…
