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)

    “Whenever any skeptic or bigot claims to be heard on the question of intellect and morals, we ask if he is familiar with the books of Plato, where all his pert objections have once for all been disposed of. If not, he has no right to our time. Let him go and find himself answered there.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    “Why does man freeze to death trying to reach the North Pole? Why does man drive himself to suffer the steam and heat of the Amazon? Why does he stagger his mind with the mathematics of the sky? Once the question mark has arisen in the human brain the answer must be found, if it takes a hundred years. A thousand years.”
    —Walter Reisch (1903–1963)

    “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)

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

    “It is doubtful whether anyone who has travelled widely has found anywhere in the world regions more ugly than in the human face.”
    —Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)