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

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 clumsy fool claims his knife is blunt.”
—Chinese proverb.

“The Moon’s the North Wind’s cooky,”
—Vachel Lindsay (1879–1931)

“This man was very clever and quick to learn anything in his line. Our tent was of a kind new to him; but when he had once seen it pitched, it was surprising how quickly he would find and prepare the pole and forked stakes to pitch it with, cutting and placing them right the first time, though I am sure that the majority of white men would have blundered several times.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

“Does the first wild-goose care
whether the others follow or not?
I don’t think so he is so happy to be off
he knows where he is going
so we must be drawn or we must fly,
like the snow-geese of the Arctic circle.”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)

“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)