Territorial Claims To The North Pole and Arctic Regions
Main article: Territorial claims in the ArcticUnder 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)
“Has anyone ever told you that you overplay your various roles rather severely, Mr. Kaplan? First you’re the outraged Madison Avenue man who claims he’s been mistaken for someone else. Then you play the fugitive from justice, supposedly trying to clear his name of a crime he knows he didn’t commit. And now you play the peevish lover stung by jealously and betrayal. It seems to me you fellows could stand a little less training from the FBI and a little more from the Actors Studio.”
—Ernest Lehman (b.1920)
“We might hypothetically possess ourselves of every technological resource on the North American continent, but as long as our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be “revolutionary” but not transformative.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“Nature confounds her summer distinctions at this season. The heavens seem to be nearer the earth. The elements are less reserved and distinct. Water turns to ice, rain to snow. The day is but a Scandinavian night. The winter is an arctic summer.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“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)