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Originally Posted by headquarters
As for potential Naval conflict - how about that northern polar ice cap dwindling? I hear the US, Canada, Denmark, Russia, China and even South Korea are sending signals that these are "their " waters? Even hear talk of submerged mountain ridges expanding from Russian waters thus widening their legal claims etc etc ..
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I totally agree. The oil and gas fields of the Middle East, Eurasia and North America and the North Sea are reaching maturity and new oil fields in Africa and South America plagued by regional instability. The Polar regions are becoming the world’s last great untapped energy reserves. The South Pole and the continent of Antarctica is strictly off limits by international treaty to mineral exploitation, but the North Pole and the Arctic is not.
The ownership of this hostile land is contested by five countries; Russia, Denmark (Greenland), Norway, the US and Canada, although other countries are also relevant to the Arctic geopolitical order, most notably Great Britain, Finland, Iceland and Sweden, and the Chinese are staking a claim in case they are literally frozen out.
The five Arctic countries control a 200-mile economic zone extending north from their northern coasts. Beyond that it’s a no-man's-land. Under UN rules an Arctic country's economic zone can be extended if it can prove that the undersea territory it wants to claim is geologically part of its own continental shelf. Using this loophole Russia has mounted a massive scientific and diplomatic effort to redraw the polar map. In 2007 Russia claimed through sonic and magnetic readings and photographs of the seabed from a nuclear powered ice breaker the discovery of an underwater ridge directly linking Russia's Arctic coast to the North Pole named the Lomonosov Ridge. According to Moscow it guarantees Russia's rights over a polar territory half the size of Western Europe which contains ten billion tons of oil and natural gas deposits. To push the point home a Russian submarine planted the Russian flag on the bottom of the sea at the North Pole. Russia is also believed to be readying a claim to an 18,000 sq mile piece of the Bering Sea, which separates Alaska from the Russian Far East.
Today Russia, Canada and the US keep isolated military posts dotted across the Arctic Circle. Any future confrontation over the Arctic would largely be a naval one, with Russia's Northern Fleet, based at Murmansk, confronting the US Navy Second Fleet. Two-thirds of Russia's naval power is allocated to its Northern Fleet. Recent forecast of far-reaching climate change in the Arctic has led to fears of future conflict in the region.
Such fears have been expressed in the defence policy of the five Arctic states. Canada, Denmark and Russia have recently implemented new foreign and defence policies with a specific emphasis on the Arctic, and have strengthened their military presence or increased their military capabilities for Arctic use. Norway has also moved a substantial part of its operational forces to the north of the country.
Only the USA has placed less focus on Arctic security, although US forces take part in the biannual training exercises (wargames) held since 2007 in Norway along with Britain, Canada, France and the Netherlands, and non-NATO Finland and Sweden. NATO’s new focus on the Arctic seems to be to contain or confront future Russian moves in the Arctic region with Canada even putting aside its past land dispute with the US over 12,000 sq km of seabed in the Beaufort Sea to defend against Russian Arctic claims and testing of its boundaries which clash with those of the US, Canada, Denmark and Norway.