- Denmark has launched an extraordinary bid for ownership
of the North Pole, one of the world's last untapped sources of oil and
natural gas.
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- In recent decades the remote polar region has largely
been left to a few explorers and tourists. Now, however, the effects of
climate change have dramatically raised the stakes.
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- Scientists estimate that the ice in the Arctic Ocean
is melting at a rate of three per cent a year - in time allowing the economic
exploitation of a region that is almost totally unexplored.
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- In the words of one Danish scientist: "The Vikings
hope to get there first."
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- At present, the North Pole is considered international
territory. The Danish bid is based on new geological data claiming to show
that the Pole and Greenland - which has been owned by Denmark since 1814
- are linked by a 1,240km underwater mountain range, the Lomonosov Ridge.
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- This would give Copenhagen a legitimate right to the
North Pole's abundant natural resources. According to the United Nations
Convention of the Sea, countries can claim economic rights to waters up
to 370km from their shores. "There is a chance that the North Pole
could become Danish," confirmed Helge Sander, Denmark's science and
technology minister, "it could give us access to oil and gas."
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- Yet the Danish claim, which will be formally made once
a survey of the Lomonosov Ridge is complete, has prompted an unseemly scramble
among Canadian and Russian scientists who are busily preparing rival arguments
over sovereignty.
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- Canada first claimed the North Pole in the late 1950s
and an international tribunal later ruled that if no disputing claim was
made within 100 years it would become Canadian territory. But while most
atlases place the region within Canadian borders, legal sovereignty has
never been granted.
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- "The Danish challenge is totally new," said
Reynald Dioron, a foreign affairs spokesman for Canada. "But it doesn't
change a thing."
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- That hasn't stopped the Danes getting excited. "The
North Pole is one of the only virgin territories left on the globe,"
said Torquil Meedon, a senior official at Denmark's ministry of science
and technology.
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- "Climate changes indicate that ice in the polar
sea may disappear within 50 to 100 years. That will open up the North-west
Passage as a new and valuable shipping route.
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- "It will also be opened up to fishing and then there
are the oil and gas reserves which may well prove significant. Who knows
how valuable the rights to the North Pole could be 100 years from now?"
In Canada, the prospect of a Viking takeover of the far north has been
greeted with dismay. Last week, one reader of the Edmonton Journal wrote:
"Let's fight the Danes for it. I propose we hold an ice hockey game
at the site of the dispute - the North Pole. The winners get to stay. The
losers have to leave."
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- In Resolute Bay, a tiny Inuit community on the edge of
the Arctic Ocean, there is bemusement at the notion of the region answering
to Copenhagen. Angela Idlout, a receptionist at the Qausuittug Inn, the
settlement's only hotel, told The Sunday Telegraph: "If you ask me
what I feel my nationality is, I will tell you that I feel Canadian, not
Danish."
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