A longer article published in the National Post...
Canadian expedition seeks to prove claim on underwater ridge
Randy Boswell, Canwest News Service
Published: Friday, February 15, 2008
Already framed by the Rockies in the west and the Laurentians in the east, Canada is preparing to lay claim to a vast and mysterious mountain range stretching across its northern frontier.
The spectacular, 2,000 km-long chain of rugged peaks and plunging canyons known as Alpha Ridge -- its jutting crest rising nearly 3,000 metres above the surrounding plain -- has never, in fact, been seen.
Submerged on the Arctic Ocean sea floor off the northwest coast of Ellesmere Island, and possibly reaching all the way to Russia, the sprawling ridge is known only from the seismic and sonar probes of polar scientists since its discovery in the early 1960s.
But it has been described as nothing less than an underwater Alps, one of Earth's last major geological features yet to be fully explored.
And beginning next month, the hidden wonder at Canada's northern doorstep is expected to begin yielding more of its secrets during a crucial sea floor mapping mission aimed at extending Canadian sovereignty to the Alpha Ridge - and its potential resource riches.
"This is a major expedition," Jacob Verhoef, the Halifax-based federal geoscientist heading the project, told Canwest News Service this week. "We are trying to prove scientifically that Alpha Ridge is a natural prolongation of the North American continent."
The seabed survey, to be conducted from makeshift research stations on Arctic ice floating above the ridge, is part of an urgent effort by Canada to meet its 2013 deadline -- set out by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea -- to propose undersea extensions to Canada's coastal boundaries.
Alpha Ridge offers one of Canada's best chances to convince the international scientific community and other polar nations that this country's continental shelf continues for hundreds of kilometres across the floor of the Arctic Ocean. If the claim is accepted, Canada could -- given the rapid melting of the Arctic ice cap, and the growing demand for undersea oil, gas and other natural resources -- one day exploit the Alpha Ridge's suspected storehouse of mineral and biological riches.
The drowned mountains, first identified in 1963 by U.S. researchers aboard a drifting ice station named Alpha, were first substantially investigated by Canadian scientists a quarter-century ago. The 1983 Canadian Expedition to Study the Alpha Ridge produced groundbreaking maps of the region, but Verhoef's research team is seeking definitive evidence that the massive rock formation is geologically linked to Canada's established continental shelf.
Verhoef, chief of the Atlantic division of the Geological Survey of Canada, says ice and weather conditions will dictate the team's precise strategy for studying the ridge. But beginning in mid-March, and continuing for up to two months, scientists based at the remote Ellesmere outpost of Eureka will be flown by helicopter to research sites hundreds of kilometres to the north and west on the ice-covered Arctic Ocean.
Using deep-sea explosives and seismic scanners, they'll gather data about the shape, composition and density of the ridge to compare with better-known stretches of Canada's polar continental shelf.
"Then," said Verhoef, "we can use that to build our case."
Among the unresolved questions about the ridge is whether it ends mid-ocean or is essentially part of the same undersea mountain range extending north from Siberia and called the Mendeleev Ridge after legendary Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleev.
Russia could well argue that the entire mountain complex is an extension of the Asian continent.
Last year, with strong backing from President Vladimir Putin, Russian scientists made bold claims about their country's ownership of the Lomonosov Ridge -- another mountain chain that traverses the Arctic Ocean between Asia and North America -- and even made a submarine dive to the sea floor at that ridge's intersection with the North Pole to plant a Russian flag.
The move was widely ridiculed as a "stunt" by Arctic experts and mocked by Peter MacKay, then Canada's minister of foreign affairs (and now the minister of defence), as a 15th-century-style act of territorial aggression.
But Russia's act of bravado made clear the looming competition for Arctic resources between polar nations. Prime Minister Stephen Harper made a strong show of commitment to Arctic sovereignty following the Russian flag-planting by announcing billions of dollars in investments in ice-reinforced patrol vessels, a deep-sea Arctic port and Far North military training centre.
Earlier this week, U.S. scientists announced the results of its own seabed mapping expedition in the western Arctic, trumpeting probable extensions to the Alaskan continental shelf near U.S.-Russia boundary waters north of the Chukchi Sea -- and predicting inevitable "overlaps" with Canadian undersea claims in the Beaufort Sea.
Verhoef told Canwest News Service that he has no intention of making "premature" or "speculative" statements about Canada's undersea claims, but did boast about "spectacular" data collected during a recent Beaufort Sea surveying expedition.
He also insisted that research efforts are "on track" for the 2013 UN deadline in several Canadian coastal regions, including the quest to bring the Alpha Ridge into Canada's geographic orbit -- and its national consciousness.
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