Arctic Waterfront, a measure of geopolitical stakes

 A mid-2011 post Beautiful maps in current affairs stated 

UN Convention on the Law of the Sea [...] by Dr Parson of the Southampton UK National Oceanographic Centre [...] described how nations were given an opportunity to claim Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) beyond the standard 200 nautical mile limit (viz. UNCLOS and UNEP). [...]

click to enlarge, original post

Recent news about sabre-rattling in the South China Sea prompted me to look up the actual EEZ boundaries, which I had downloaded for a project mentioned earlier - this issue also discussed re: the Arctic here and here - the area in dispute jumps out of the map just posted on arcgis.com.0 Its immensity is very apparent by using the Measure tool: roughly three quarter million square kilometres or a quarter million square miles!

Well, the sabre-rattling has hardly abated - anyone heard of Greenland lately? - and I re-used a previous Arctic map  to extend the stats hinted at above. The Arctic NATO countries are the seven NATO members that have territory within the Arctic Circle: Canada, the United States, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden... and Arctic Review stats send me mapping to fact-check!

• 8 Arctic countries
• 53% of Arctic Ocean’s coastline lies in Russia
• 50% of Norway’s land lies above the Arctic Circle
• 1/2of Canadian Arctic's inhabitants are  Indigenous Peoples

click to enlarge, full size here

Enlarge the map to see A: Grinnell Pen. on Devon Isl. near the centre, B: Wrangel Isl.  in then Soviet Arctic Chukchi Sea "not far" from the US border centre left, and C: Beechey Isl. near the centre where the first remains of the Franklin Expedition were found three years later (Wikipedia).

A: this is no new concern either - blog here & following - my summer in the Arctic Isl. exactly 40 yrs ago exposed me to not a little lore - this blog here & here, other blog here - indeed on many a fog-bound day when we got tired of playing cribbage (Wikipedia), listening to East German radio extolling the virtues of Communism (this was 1985) or to Talking Heads the band of the day, we wondered what the Arctic waterfront looked like for our neighbours the US and USSR across the North Pole? 

As I compiled the Arctic Islands geology then, I talked to the National Topographic Survey. Did you know that new-found geographic features were named off the next fallen soldiers on a roll of WWI & WWII conscription? Quebec stopped that, renaming them back to First Nations incl. Inuit originals. And there were some exceptions like Butter Porridge Bay, named by Fritjoff Nansen who overwintered there and their treat was a dollop of butter on their porridge on Christmas Eve (maybe an urban Arctic legend, Perplexity, though I swear I saw it on a map).

click to enlarge, original here

But I digress: there was an informal way of estimating "waterfront" by simply dividing the Exclusive Economic Zone by the shoreline length facing the Arctic Ocean - these was in particular why the Falklands War was started: Argentina would double its Antarctic waterfront if they were "Las Malvinas" (indeed Breton & Basque 19th c. whalers called them "Les Malouines"); claims to Antarctic research zones were based on said waterfront - are the stats above not interesting in terms of who claims sovereignty where?

B: one of the geologists ended up on Wrangel Isl. the next year as part of cooperative exchange. As mentioned in previous blogs, Canada was not under US hegemony, and there was petroleum exploration in Cuba & Libya, or there was a biweekly charter plane over the North Pole from Calgary to Novosibirsk at the time. The Polar Continental Shelf Program was also to put "boots on the ground" and help claim the entire pie from Beaufort Sea E of Alaska to North Pole and down Nares Strait W of Greenland, which of course the US challenges... Ergo the geologic exchange program between the matching Geological Surveys of then Soviet Union & Canada (GSC)!

C: Owen Beatty (not the film star) from University of Alberta - in Edmonton two hours drive north of Calgary - and the Arctic Institute of North America - across the street from the GSC and top floor of the University of Calgary Geosciences building - set the wheels in motion of rediscovering the fate of the Franklin Expedition that made the news a couple of decades later with the discovery of the Terror and the Erebus, the scientific vessels that carried the fateful expedition to, not thru, the Northwest Passage.

I hope you enjoyed this armchair romp thru history & geography by way of maps that show it all off so well, don't they? Please feel free to comment below, or to check my social footprint on the web version of this blog!