'All high fives': Canada wraps up research mission to prove Arctic ownership claims

Canadian researchers have wrapped up a three-year mission to map the limits of the Arctic continental shelf and scientifically prove the claim for a resource-rich area leading up to the North Pole.

Under international convention, countries have control over an economic zone reaching 200 nautical miles from their coasts. Arctic countries that can prove the outer limits of their territory extend under the sea floor can claim a larger area — and the oil and minerals potentially locked deep below the ocean's surface. 

"It has huge ramifications for our country," said Mary-Lynn Dickson, the director of Canada's United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea program.

"It's our last legal boundary and we will have jurisdiction over the natural resources on the sea floor and in the seabed for that extended continental shelf once we receive recognition."

Dickson just returned from a 47-day survey, aboard the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Louis S. St-Laurent, where she was chief scientist along with 23 other researchers and dozens more crew. 

"All of this data is fundamentally going to increase our knowledge of the Arctic Ocean and it will allow us to submit a complete justification for Canada outlining where we think our outer limits are for the extended continental shelf."

While it's too early to say exactly how big an area Canada will claim, Dickson says it will like be about 500,000 to 800,000 square kilometres, or about half the size of Canada's submission for the Atlantic Ocean.

A celebration and 'a lot of smiles'

This year's favourable ice conditions allowed the group to collect about four times more data than in the previous two years of the mission. 

"We were able to go to areas that we hadn't been able to survey before," Dickson said.

Working in the Arctic Ocean has been "extremely complex logistically" with only a small window of time to travel the route each year, she said. 

With the help of the Oden, a Swedish icebreaker, the group towed sensitive scientific gear through frigid waters and between broken slates of ice a couple of metres thick. 

There was a celebration on deck when work in the northernmost area of Canada's claim was finished. 

"It was all high fives around the ship," she said. 

"It was a lot of handshakes, a lot of smiles, a lot of hugs. And it was kind of a bittersweet moment when the two ships blasted their horns and they separated."

Claim still years away

Now that the research is done, Dickson says her team is preparing for the lengthy process of analyzing the data and making a submission to the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf. 

She expects that will take about two years. 

"You have to produce hundreds of maps. You have to produce the scientific justification for why you think the outer limits are where they are and that's a document that's a good thousand pages long," she said. 

Rob Huebert, an Arctic expert and associate professor at the University of Calgary, says there's no rush. 

"In all probability, it is going to take a lot of time before we actually start exploiting the resources in the extended continental shelf in the Arctic," he said. 

The area of soil and subsoil, which house the Arctic's great untapped oil and gas reserves, are not likely to be disturbed anytime soon. 

"Pretty much everyone has left except for the Russians, because of the collapse of world oil prices," said Huebert. 

"But once they start returning, they'll return to closer waters in what's referred to as the economic exclusive zone before they start going into the continental shelf. But it will happen at one point or another."

Russian negotiations

Canada is the last country to submit its claim for Arctic territory.

Russia submitted its initial claim more than a decade ago, but the United Nations sent it back for lack of evidence. Last year, the country revealed it was claiming ownership of 1.2 million square kilometres of the Arctic continental shelf. 

Huebert says once the United Nations validates the science behind the claims, it will be up to the countries themselves to negotiate any overlapping areas. 

"It's not to provide political guidance on how to divide," says Huebert on UNCLOS. "That's left up to the countries through these different techniques that the treaty provides."

"Basically you're going to be getting Russia, Canada and Denmark sitting down and saying: how do we proceed now."

Given the current state of Russia-Canada relations, Huebert says it's possible Canada will wait to submit its claim until the political climate for this significant negotiation is right.

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