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)

    “Though an unpleasant sort of person, and even a queer threatener withal, yet, if one meets him, one must get along with him as one can; for his ignorance is extreme. And what under heaven indeed should such a phantasm as Death know, for all that the Appearance tacitly claims to be somebody that knows much?”
    —Herman Melville (1819–1891)

    “Civilization does not engross all the virtues of humanity: she has not even her full share of them. They flourish in greater abundance and attain greater strength among many barbarous people. The hospitality of the wild Arab, the courage of the North American Indian, and the faithful friendships of some of the Polynesian nations, far surpass any thing of a similar kind among the polished communities of Europe.”
    —Herman Melville (1819–1891)

    “Midwinter spring is its own season
    Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
    Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.”
    —T.S. (Thomas Stearns)

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

    “What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.”
    —Salvador Dali (1904–1989)