North Pole - Territorial Claims To The North Pole and Arctic Regions

Territorial Claims To The North Pole and Arctic Regions

Main article: Territorial claims in the Arctic

Under international law, no country currently owns the North Pole or the region of the Arctic Ocean surrounding it. The five surrounding Arctic countries, Russia, Canada, Norway, Denmark (via Greenland), and the United States (via Alaska), are limited to a 200-nautical-mile (370 km; 230 mi) exclusive economic zone around their coasts, and the area beyond that is administered by the International Seabed Authority.

Upon ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, a country has a ten year period to make claims to an extended continental shelf beyond its 200 mile exclusive economic zone. If accepted, such a claim gives the claimant state rights to what may be on or beneath the sea bottom within the claimed zone. Norway (ratified the convention in 1996), Russia (ratified in 1997), Canada (ratified in 2003) and Denmark (ratified in 2004) have all launched projects to base claims that certain areas of Arctic continental shelves should be subject to their sole sovereign exploitation.

In 1907 Canada invoked a "sector principle" to claim sovereignty over a sector stretching from its coasts to the North Pole. Although this claim has not been relinquished, neither has it been consistently pressed.

Read more about this topic:  North Pole

Famous quotes containing the words territorial, claims, north, pole, arctic and/or regions:

    “All the territorial possessions of all the political establishments in the earth—including America, of course—consist of pilferings from other people’s wash.”
    —Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)

    “A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky.”
    —Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)

    “The Anglo-Saxon hive have extirpated Paganism from the greater part of the North American continent; but with it they have likewise extirpated the greater portion of the Red race. Civilization is gradually sweeping from the earth the lingering vestiges of Paganism, and at the same time the shrinking forms of its unhappy worshippers.”
    —Herman Melville (1819–1891)

    “O, withered is the garland of the war,
    The soldier’s pole is fallen!”
    —William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    “The chisel work of an enormous Glacier
    That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.”
    —Robert Frost (1874–1963)

    “We have wasted our spirit in the regions of the abstract and general just as the monks let it wither in the world of prayer and contemplation.”
    —Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)