Race to claim the Arctic warns of new era of geographical imperialism soon to be taken out of this world

This month Russia embarked on an expedition to symbolically plant a flag on the sea bed beneath the North Pole. The audacious gesture, which has incensed Canada, was followed by the lodging of a claim of sovereignty with the United Nations. A Canadian foreign minister is reported to have cried “This isn't the 15th century… You can't go around the world and just plant flags and say: 'We're claiming this territory”. Whilst there are all manner of moral, ethical, cultural and economic arguments against the move, global hypocrisy and the need to utilise the world’s natural resources to power mechanised nations suggest that the moral high ground adopted by Canada and others are more about the need to expand their own geographical imperialist adventures. Ethics and if necessary, the rule of law will be rendered irrelevant in this new debate with the environmental changes and its impact on the ice in the Artic region rendered utterly immaterial.

Canada, for all its posturing, has allocated $7 billion to patrolling the Artic Circle with icebreakers and plans for a military training base on Nunavut in Quebec home to the Inuit people who also inhabit the Artic regions of Alaska, Greenland and Canada. Canada is also engaged in a dispute with Denmark over the sovereignty of Hans Island, a piece of uninhabited barren land off Greenland measuring 1.3 km². Denmark are claiming the region of the North Pole via the province of Greenland whilst Canada is declaring that the region belongs to them.

At the root of this new caucasian escapade is the dependence on the melting of the ice in the Artic region. This summer saw more ice melting than ever before which will enable predatory nations to exploit the Artic seabed for oil, gas and minerals. In approximately two years from September 2005, the Arctic ice sheet reduced in mass by just over 2% from 5.3 square kilometers to 4.9m square kilometers.

If the Arctic pack ice in the Northwest Passage, a sea route through the Arctic Ocean, continues to melt this will enable the region to become more navigable for shipping trade as it would reduce shipping routes between Europe and Asia by thousands of miles. The sovereignty of the region, currently claimed by Canada, is a matter of international disagreement with some countries asserting that the Passage is an international transit route which would permit unfettered passage for all.

Antarctica has also fallen prey to the same debate. The region had previously been free from national claims when 12 nations, including the UK, decided to resist individual claims to the region in favour of the common good. Britain is now preparing to reassert its sovereign rights over parts of the Antarctic and the adjacent seabed to protect its drilling rights. An article in the Guardian newspaper on 18 October 2007, highlighted the danger of this new trend: “National claims of this kind are genuinely destabilising. They send a signal about the unraveling of the international legal order. They quicken the race between rival states for control of the planet's resources at a time when the peoples of the world have never been more conscious of their common environmental responsibilities.”