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A Beaufort seabed survey will enhance Canada’s submission to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, writes Randy Boswell.
The federal scientist heading Canada’s bid to claim thousands of square kilometres of Arctic Ocean seabed under a UN convention says a joint United States-Canada mapping mission to the Beaufort Sea this fall yielded “very promising” results that could vastly extend this country’s territory in one of the polar region’s richest target zones for offshore oil and gas.
“The quality of the data is astonishing,” Halifax-based geoscientist Jacob Verhoef says. “We haven’t analysed it all, but what we found is that the entire Beaufort Sea — all the way up to the north — is covered with significant amounts of sediments, which makes our case look very promising.”
Under rules laid out in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, Canada’s claims for extended undersea jurisdiction in the Western Arctic hinge on the thickness of sediments deposited on the ocean bottom over tens of thousands of years by the Mackenzie River, which discharges millions of tonnes of silt annually into the Beaufort near the Northwest Territories-Yukon border.
Arctic Ocean currents then carry the sediments far beyond the mainland shore of northern Canada, depositing them along the way in seabed layers of hardened muck that are now hundreds of metres thick: enough, potentially, to constitute a legal extension of mainland Canada under convention rules.
“It certainly looks like we will be able to extend all the way up to the northern Beaufort,” says Mr. Verhoef, adding that experts will spend the next year interpreting the latest data ahead of a 2013 deadline for Canada’s UN submission.
The U.S. is also gathering information about the sea floor off the Alaskan coast for its eventual UN territorial claims.
This year, for the first time, Canadian and U.S. scientists collaborated extensively on a Beaufort seabed survey. The project began in mid-August and ended in early October.
Researchers aboard the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Healy and the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Louis S. St-Laurent shared equipment and expertise to map a huge swath of the Beaufort, combining sonar and seismic measurements to create detailed pictures of the sea floor, including areas never fully mapped in the past….
