Greenland’s foreign minister responded to the allegations by accusing European countries which are pushing for a ban on deep-water drilling of suffering “panic reactions” after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Wallis, however, said at the meeting at Cambridge University this week that wider participation in the Arctic Council must become a reality.

“It’s got to be widened out. If we don’t do things then people will take to the streets to make sure something is done over climate change,” she said in a report by the Guardian.

Interest in the Arctic region has increased in recent years as global warming has triggered a race for natural resources that have long been trapped under the ice. Oil companies have already started to drill in the area, including Edinburgh-based Cairn Energy which announced two new oil and gas “shows” of the coast of Greenland in the past month.

The EU has, however, been pressing for a ban on deep water drilling since the BP blow-out earlier this year in the Gulf of Mexico.

Greenland’s deputy foreign minister, Inuuteq Holm Oslen, said he is suspicious about the motives behind such “green” concerns.

“We welcome focus and attention on environmental issues […] What we don’t welcome is the notion that there should not be any industrial development in the name of environmental protection. What the rest of you have been benefiting from should not be denied to us in the Arctic,” he said.

“For now, the disputes in the north have been dealt with peacefully, but climate change could alter the equilibrium over the coming years in the race of temptation for exploitation of more readily accessible natural resources,” said Admiral Stavridis.

He also added that military forces have an important role to play in the area – mainly for specialist assistance around commercial and other interests.

These remarks came on the eve of a conference at the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, which convenes on Wednesday. This NATO Advanced Research Workshop entitled “Environmental Security in the Arctic Ocean” aims at creating a dialogue between all polar and sub-polar countries in order to avert a danger of a new cold war. The workshop will be attended by representatives from 16 countries including non-NATO members like Russia, Finland and Sweden.

There are several interesting points in Admiral Stavridis’ remarks.

First, the assumption that the so called global warming has made access to Arctic mineral resources easier, and that the situation is there to stay. Until now, there has not been a 100 percent proof that the global warming is a long-lasting tendency. The academics are divided on the issue, and, for most part, all references to it are biased and motivated either by politics or a desire to extract grants from sponsors.

Second, the warning of a new confrontation pronounced by a senior NATO commander is not supported by any substantial evidence. On the contrary, recent events show that polar countries can find a common language and successfully resolve decades-old disputes, as was demonstrated by a Russian-Norwegian agreement on the border in the Barents Sea signed on September 15 this year.

Oh yes, there was a small thing in that agreement: it was concluded and signed without any participation of NATO structures however strong was the pressure from NATO to have a hand in it.

One more factor that probably worries the senior NATO commander is the fact that vast mineral resources have been discovered in Greenland. Today, that territory belongs to Denmark and, as such is part of NATO. But while the forthcoming independence of Greenland seems imminent sooner or later, no one can predict whether it will choose to remain within the alliance. So, Admiral Stavridis decided to launch a preemptive attack.

What is important, though, is the fact that new technologies together with the warming in the Arctic region (whether it is a long-lasting tendency or a temporary one) do allow for more active exploration of mineral resources there. And therefore all five countries having direct access to the Arctic Ocean (besides Russia and Norway, they are the USA, Canada and Denmark), as well as countries regarded as sub-Arctic (Iceland, Sweden and Finland) show a natural interest in the exploration. But what gives the Admiral ground to treat natural and inevitable disputes as signs of a new ‘cold war’?

The answer can be clearly drawn from his comments, namely from his remark about the role of the military. As one of the bloggers commenting on the article in ‘The Guardian’ wrote, the Admiral’s words should be interpreted in the following way, “We want more money please. Yours, US Navy.”

Probably not only that and Admiral Stavridis were not motivated by the task of getting additional funding from US lawmakers for the Navy. At least, not by that task alone. Actually, his remarks fall in line with often repeated western apprehensions that Russia is allegedly seeking dominance in the Arctic region.

But two weeks ago at the international Arctic forum in Moscow those apprehensions were clearly and unambiguously addressed by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin who said that it is our common responsibility to turn the Arctic into an area of peace and cooperation, thus excluding any possibility of a war – whether ‘cold’ or ‘hot’ – between the countries of the region.

Members of Russia’s North Pole expedition Shelf-2010 have docked with their colleagues on board the Akademik Fyodorov icebreaker, the flagship of the Northern fleet, a virtual floating laboratory. Around a hundred scientists have spent 70 days in the Arctic gathering evidence to support the claim that the Lomonosov Ridge is part of Russia’s continental shelf.

The details of the mission are being kept top secret, but the head of the expedition, Andrey Zenkov, looks more than pleased with the results.

This past summer saw in increase of maritime traffic through the Northwest Passage— with nearly a dozen ships and smaller boats anchored outside Cambridge Bay at the height of the season.

Several ran into trouble: the Clipper Adventurer hit a rock near Kugluktuk, the Nanny grounded on shoals near Gjoa Haven and a specially-designed rowbooat floundered near Cambridge Bay.

“As vessel traffic increases, inexperience with navigating in the challenging conditions of the Arctic can create real dangers,” said Capt. John Lowell, director of United State’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in a NOAA news release. “Currently, charting data in much of the Arctic is woefully out of date or nonexistent. Inadequate charts pose a significant risk for marine safety, potentially leading to loss of life or environmental disaster, as evidenced by recent vessel groundings.”

Canadian ice specialists have said only about 10 per cent of Arctic waters off Canada have been charted properly.

To improve mapping, icebreakers like the Canadian Coast Guard’s Amundsen use echo-sounding technologies to measure water depths, find underwater physical features, and gather data on the characteristics of the seafloor.

“The establishment of the Arctic Regional Hydrographic Commission will help build synergy among the Arctic Coastal States to ensure safety of life at sea, assist in protecting the increasingly fragile Arctic ecosystem and support the maritime economy,” Lowell said.

Regional hydrographic commissions are formed through the International Hydrographic Organization IHO, an intergovernmental consultative and technical organization with membership from 82 countries.

The Arctic has been the only part of the world not covered by an IHO regional commission.

Now the decline in the amount of ice in the Arctic Ocean is turning their failed dream into a reality.

Between 1906 and 2006 only 69 ships made the journey but in 2009 alone 24 vessels made the journey, according to Canadian maritime law expert Michael Byers, Germany’s Der Spiegel newspaper reported.

Icelandic President Olafur Ragnar Grímsson recently claimed that the route was becoming a “trans-Arctic Panama Canal,” the paper said.

Der Spiegel reported that new ships are being designed to cope with icebergs on the journey.

The MV Nordic Barents is due to arrive in the Chinese port of Lianyungang after a 3,500-mile journey through the Arctic Ocean from the Norwegian port of Kirkenes, the newspaper said. A Russian icebreaker sent to protect the ship, which was carrying iron ore concentrate, was not needed with broken ice floes only passing nearby twice.

“The nuclear icebreaker was more for decoration than anything else … and we didn’t have to stop once,” Felix Tschudi, a spokesman for the shipping company which chartered the freighter, told Der Spiegel.

Tschudi said the MV Nordic Barents’s journey time was half what it would have been. “That saved us 15 days at sea,” Tschudi added.

The Russian tanker Baltika, carrying 70,000 tons of gas condensate, also traveled a few weeks ago from the Russian port of Murmansk to the Chinese city of Ningbo through the Arctic without incident, the newspaper added.

However, the danger of sea ice remains.

“Even during the summer months, you have to expect isolated ice floes,” climate researcher Lawson Brigham, a former icebreaker captain who co-authored a comprehensive study of the new Arctic sea routes, told Der Spiegel.

Plans for two new nuclear icebreakers were announced at an Arctic conference in Moscow last week with an adjustable draft which enables them to operate in shallow waters, it reported.

The dangers of sea ice were illustrated in a crash between two tankers in July off the coast of the New Siberian Islands, Der Spiegel said. The tankers, both loaded with 13,300 tons of diesel, collided when the lead ship slowed down because of large amounts of ice.

The Murmansk Shipping Company, which owns the ships, said the accident caused only minor dents and was “no emergency,” according to Der Spiegel.

Brigham warned against too much optimism about the potential for the route, because of the unpredictable nature of the sea ice. He does not foresee large numbers of vessels traveling between Europe and the Far East.

“What will really increase is the removal of huge amounts of raw materials from the Arctic,” he told the newspaper.

]]> http://arcticfocus.com/ships-take-to-arctic-ocean-as-sea-ice-melts/feed/ 0 http://arcticfocus.com/russia-to-launch-rescue-centers-in-the-arcitc/ http://arcticfocus.com/russia-to-launch-rescue-centers-in-the-arcitc/#comments Mon, 07 Jun 2010 16:07:43 +0000 SuperUser http://arcticfocus.com/?p=1406 MOSCOW, June 7 (Xinhua) — Russian Emergency Ministry plans to launch a system of search and rescue centers in Russian Arctic territories, a high ranking official said Monday.

The ministry intended to build 10 rescue centers in the area with the aim to monitor and prevent emerging incidents, RIA Novosti news agency cited Maxim Vladimirov, an official of the ministry, as saying.

Polar regions, territorial waters and the Northern Sea route will be also under responsibility of the ministry, he added.

The official did not rule out the possibility of giving emergency medical response to all damage on the bordering territories in accordance with the international law.

Over 150 permanent personnel are expected to work round the clock at the scene, he noted.

The cost of one rescue center is estimated at around 5.5 million U.S. dollars.

Putin told state-run Rossiya 24 television in the Arctic he was shocked to see stocks of “abandoned barrels of fuel scattered all the way to the horizon.” It was not immediately clear when Putin made the trip.

“The decrease in military activity after the collapse of the USSR has left this dump which we see now. The pollution level is six times higher than normal. What we need to do now is to organize a sweeping cleanup of the Arctic,” he said.

He said fuel may leak into the Arctic Ocean from the rusty barrels as temperatures slowly rise.

An increase of up to 4 degrees Celsius has been felt across the Arctic in the past 30 years. While some scientists put it down to fluctuating weather patterns, environmentalist groups say it is caused by global warming due to human activity.

Putin mentioned the trip in a speech to parliament on April 20 but the Russian media only released the material on Thursday. Foreign reporters did not accompany Putin on the trip.

The footage was aired just days after Russia and Norway agreed on the course of their Arctic border after a decades-old dispute, paving the way for oil and gas exploration.

“Geopolitically, Russia’s most vital national interests are linked to the Arctic,” said Putin, wearing a red polar jacket and cap bearing Russia’s national symbol — a two-headed eagle.

During the Cold War, the archipelago, home to a large population of polar bears, was Russia’s outpost in the Arctic and hosted an air defense base and military air strip.

Media-savvy Putin, 57, who has shot a tiger with a tranquilizer gun and released a pair of Persian leopards into the wild, was shown attaching a satellite-tracking tag onto the neck of a tranquilized male polar bear and shook its paw.

“The paw shake was strong,” a smiling Putin said. “It is clear he is the real Lord of the Arctic.”

According to nytimes.com, the leaders of Russia and Norway amicably resolved on Tuesday a 40-year-old dispute over dividing the Barents Sea and part of the Arctic Ocean into clear economic zones that extend to the edge of Europe’s northern continental shelf.

The agreement opened the way for oil and natural gas exploration in a potentially lucrative part of the Barents Sea that equals more than half the Norwegian mainland.

“I believe this will open the way for many joint projects, especially in the area of energy,” President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia said at a news conference. The agreement must be ratified by the legislatures of the two countries.

The Norwegian prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, said it showed good will in the face of rising international anxiety over who controls the Arctic seabed, which by some estimates contains a quarter of the world’s remaining fossil fuels.

“This is a confirmation that Norway and Russia, two large polar nations, do not have a policy about racing, but a policy about cooperation,” he said.

When Russian scientists planted a flag on the seabed at the North Pole in 2007, it seemed that a “race to the Arctic” was on, with northern nations aggressively jostling for the right to exploit resources that were previously out of reach.

Willy Ostreng, chairman of Norway’s Ocean Futures research institute, said the agreement’s foundation in international law and bilateral negotiation bodes well for future conflicts in the far north, where interest in shipping and offshore petroleum production may intensify if the polar ice cap continues to recede in response to warming temperatures.

“It’s a model case for what may happen in the future in the Arctic,” Mr. Ostreng said.

The Norwegian and Russian frontiers cap Europe’s northernmost bulge. The new delimitation extends the two countries’ 122-mile land border northward beyond all the islands of the Barents Sea and into the Arctic Ocean, although the two leaders did not provide an exact northward distance.

Conventional practice elsewhere in the world has been to position maritime boundaries at the midpoint between opposing land masses, and for 40 years that has been Norway’s goal with respect to its Svalbard archipelago to the west and the Russian island groups of Novaya Zemlya and Franz Josef Land to the east. Russia argued instead for a “meridian line” boundary running more or less straight north from the mainland, which would have gained it an extra 67,000 square miles of economic territory — about equal to the entire Norwegian sector of the North Sea, whose oil resources have made Norway a rich country.

Mr. Stoltenberg said the line approved on Tuesday splits that disputed area about in half, which means the line will still run considerably closer to the Norwegian islands than the Russian ones. A number of oil or gas fields identified by Russian seismic surveys in the 1980s are thought to straddle the line.

“Both parties believe the disputed area contains rich deposits of mineral resources, in particular oil and gas,” said Mr. Ostreng. “But they don’t know for sure. And when you don’t know for sure, you act as if the area is extremely rich. It is not easy to give up strategic resources.”

A spokesman for Greenpeace, the international environmental organization, said he was startled by how the two leaders talked about oil and gas exploration immediately after announcing the new boundary.

Geologists say the eastern Barents, under Russian economic stewardship, probably contains far more oil and gas than the Norwegian sector, though the Norwegians have beaten their neighbors to the punch by starting production in a western Barents field called Snow White. Based on expertise gained there, a Norwegian company, Statoil, has signed up to help Russia’s state gas giant, Gazprom, develop a large offshore field called Shtokman far out at sea on the Russian side of the Barents. That technologically demanding project has been delayed, however, by low gas prices.

At a meeting in Canada of the Arctic nations last month, Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Store of Norway seemed to express frustration over the Russia’s longstanding opposition to placing the maritime boundary at an equal distance between islands of the two nations. He was widely quoted as saying Russia was “not yet a stable, predictable state.”

The two states have clashed in the past over fishing rights and practices in the Barents Sea, which contains vast stocks of cod. But in recent years Russia and Norway have worked closely on a shared fisheries management system. So while the new dividing line will add clarity it will not alter fishing practices on a large scale, according to Mr. Ostreng.

He added that the area in question qualifies as the high seas, so no matter where the line was drawn it would not affect passage by naval vessels or commercial ships.

The disagreement over a 200-square-kilometre section of the Lincoln Sea emerged in the early 1970s when the countries were first delineating the offshore boundary north of Canada’s Ellesmere Island and Danish-controlled Greenland.

While another dispute to the south over Hans Island has received considerable attention in recent years, the Lincoln Sea issue has remained a low-profile irritant in Canadian-Danish relations.

A Foreign Affairs spokesperson has disclosed that Canadian and Danish officials met this week in Copenhagen to begin sharing information about the Lincoln Sea dispute and exploring potential solutions.

“The purpose of the meeting was to exchange highly technical information about the maritime boundary,” Catherine Loubier, a spokeswoman for Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon, told Canwest News Service. “The information exchanged by experts will be examined by officials with a view to possible next steps.”

The meeting involved specialists from the Canadian Hydrographic Service and Denmark’s main geological surveying agency, she added.

“Both the Hans Island dispute and the Lincoln Sea dispute continue to be well managed,” Loubier noted.

The development comes on the eve of a five-nation Arctic Summit to be held Monday near Ottawa, where Cannon is hosting U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and their counterparts from Norway and Denmark.

The meeting is intended to show how the five Arctic coastal states are co-operating in the pursuit of economic development in the rapidly melting polar realm while creating new arrangements to protect the northern environment, prepare for potential shipping emergencies and enhance security in the region.

A key message from the five countries has been that current and potential territorial disputes in the Far North will be resolved peacefully through negotiation and – in the case of claims for new undersea territory under a UN treaty on extending continental shelves – geological data being gathered by scientists.

From Canada’s point of view, the point of contention in the Lincoln Sea dispute has been Denmark’s inclusion of tiny Beaumont Island off Greenland’s northwest coast in calculating the boundary, which is determined in that region by an “equidistance” principle that draws the line halfway between points along each country’s coastline.

Canada has basically argued that the Beaumont “rock” poking out of the waves is too insignificant.

Canwest News Service.

As officials from those countries prepare to meet next week in Ottawa, the study’s author wonders if that arms race could eventually lead to conflict — even one that has nothing to do with the North.

“It’s not about a conflict in the Arctic so much as a conflict somewhere else spilling into the Arctic,” said Rob Huebert of the University of Calgary’s Centre for Military and Strategic Studies.

“It’s not that they’re fighting over the Arctic, it’s that they have their capabilities based in the Arctic. The Arctic becomes an innocent bystander.”

Huebert has reviewed Arctic-capable military spending for the United States, Canada, Norway, Russia and Sweden — the five nations that are to meet in Chelsea, Que., on Monday.

Since 1989, those countries have either built or announced plans for a total of at least 66 combat-capable vessels that are specifically intended for northern waters or are capable of operating there.

They include Norway’s fast ice-strengthened frigates, Denmark’s 12 new offshore patrol vessels and 12 projected nuclear submarines from the U.S.

Canada has promised at least six patrol vessels of its own and a state-of-the-art coast guard icebreaker. The federal government has also said it will build a winter warfare school and a military port, create a dedicated Arctic military unit and improve northern surveillance capability.

Canada and countries such as Norway have already increased the size and number of their Arctic military manoeuvres.

But Russia has made the biggest noise with 15 proposed new subs and a nuclear-powered icebreaker. It has resumed bomber patrols up to the edge of North American airspace, sent warships and submarines into Arctic waters and promised to increase its military resources based there.

Diplomats have their work cut out for them next week, Huebert said. “It’s a matter of being able to ensure that Russia is contained within the co-operative format, that it’s made to be within the Russian interest to stay co-operative.”

But Russia and all the other Arctic states are already co-operating, said Michael Byers, a professor of international law at the University of British Columbia.

Russia and Canada are working out joint search-and-rescue protocols, he said. Danish soldiers are to accompany Canadians on a sovereignty patrol later this spring. U.S. and Canadian geologists are working together to map the Arctic sea floor.

“The direction is in a pretty positive orientation right now,” Byers said.

Countries are putting more resources into overseeing a once-inaccessible region that is quickly opening up due to global warming, he added.

“I don’t see a military buildup that’s directed at state threats in the Arctic. What I see is a perfectly logical response to the constabulary responsibilities that come with a newly opened coastline.

“I’m concerned when people start to build up the risk of conflict. If you talk enough about conflict, it can become self-fulfilling.”
Source: Canadian Press.