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Underwater survey to boost Canada's Arctic domain nearly finished
last update: Jun 01, 2011 01:26 PM
From a "Vancouver Sun" article: A High Arctic mapping expedition this summer along a mysterious undersea mountain chain near the North Pole will mark the culmination of a 10-year federal research project aimed at adding millions of square kilometres of ocean floor to Canada's territorial possessions.
Jacob Verhoef, a Halifax-based geoscientist and the head of the Canadian government's efforts to secure vast new stretches of seabed territory under a UN treaty on extended continental shelves, said that his team's last scheduled underwater survey for Canada's claim will be carried out jointly with U.S. researchers in August along the little-studied Alpha Ridge, a drowned mountain range more than 1,500 kilometres north of the Yukon's Arctic Ocean coast.
"That would be the end of the field work," said Verhoef, noting that this year's research should give Canada "sufficient scientific data" to finalize its claim — but adding the caveat that unpredictable weather in the Arctic always requires having a "Plan B" in case things go wrong. "If we don't get the exact information this summer for reasons of ice conditions or equipment failure or whatever, then we have the option to go back in 2012," he said.
"Things have gone pretty well. We have collected more or less the amount of data that we had planned," Verhoef added. "We were always hoping that if nothing went wrong we would finish by 2011 and then have two years to analyze and review and write everything up."
Collaborative expeditions were conducted with scientists from the U.S. and Denmark, both of which are also competing with Canad, for undersea land grabs in northern waters. Verhoef said of the research partnerships "It's been very important," noting that "we probably could have done it on our own" but that working with Denmark and the U.S. have probably yielded more geographical coverage in survey work and higher-quality information for all three countries' eventual UN submissions.
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Vancouver Sun, 30th May 2011
