U.S. and Canada on collision course over Arctic rights: U.S. official

A leading U.S. government scientist says his country and Canada are on a collision course over seabed rights in the Arctic Ocean, where vast, untapped oil and gas deposits are fuelling an undersea land grab and researchers from all polar nations are racing to collect data backing their countries’ territorial claims.

Andy Armstrong, a top official with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and co-director of the U.S. Joint Hydrographic Centre, says there’s “no question” that U.S. efforts to secure sovereignty over an extended continental shelf off the northern coast of Alaska are bound to “overlap” with Canada’s own claims in the region.


The two countries have already sparred for years over where, precisely, the international boundary between Canada and the U.S. should be drawn through the Beaufort Sea.

Now, that struggle is set to go to the sea floor.

“If the U.S. goes north and Canada goes out toward the west, then those areas are going to overlap,” Armstrong told Canwest News Service, a day after NOAA unveiled a “big discovery” about the geology of the floor of the Chukchi Sea that it says will bolster U.S. claims in the boundary waters between Russia and Alaska.

Canwest News Service