A tiny speck of pebbles found off the northern coast of
Greenland could open up a new front in the looming battle for
control of the Arctic and the North Pole.
The best candidate to date for the world's northernmost point of
land - a mythical place sought by explorers for centuries - was
spotted in July during an expedition led by Arctic veteran Dennis
Schmitt.
California-based Schmitt, best-known for his 2005 discovery of
Warming Island off the eastern coast of Greenland, named it Stray
Dog West because, he said, it erred under the ice.
It was exposed mainly by shifting pack ice.
As Greenland is under Denmark's administration, this scrap of land
just 40 metres long could extend Danish territory further north and
strengthen Copenhagen's claim on the pole.
Its discovery comes as countries around the Arctic Ocean - the
United States, Russia, Canada, Denmark, Norway and Iceland - are
rushing to stake out the Polar Basin's seabed, fishing rights and
maritime routes.
"This little island could have a wide international significance,"
said Stefan Talmon, professor of international law at Oxford
University in Britain.
"With the ice melting, more and more of these islands could
emerge and play a role in maritime delimitations," he said.
Denmark sent an icebreaker to the Arctic this summer to collect
geological data in preparation for its claim to extend its shelf
beyond the established 370 km from Greenland's baseline.
If a country can show the seabed is a natural extension of its land
territory, it gets the exclusive right to exploit the resources
contained in its subsoil.
As temperatures are rising faster in the Arctic than elsewhere and
the ice sheet is retreating - it has shrunk by more than a quarter
in the past 30 years - previously inaccessible oil and gas reserves
could be within reach in decades.
"Five potential claim areas have been identified off the Faroe
Islands and Greenland, potentially including the North Pole,"
Denmark's Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation says on
its website
www.a76.dk.
Polar battle
Russia sought to stamp its authority on the pole this summer by
planting its flag on the seabed beneath it, in a theatrical move
that prompted irate responses from Ottawa and Washington.
Russia argues a ridge under the Arctic Ocean makes the pole
Russian, even though the coast of Siberia is 2,000 km away.
Canada said earlier this month it would map its entire Arctic
seabed.
It is planning to build a deep-water port for patrol vessels
near the eastern entrance of the fabled Northwest Passage, which
was ice-free for the first time this summer.
Russia, like Norway, has until 2009 to submit a claim to extend its
territory to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental
Shelf: Canada has until 2013 and Denmark until 2014.
The United States has not ratified the UN Convention on the Law of
the Sea (UNCLOS) of 1982 but the Bush administration is trying to
do so.
Only countries that have ratified it can make continental shelf
claims, and get 10 years to make them.
Island or rock
But whether Stray Dog West helps extend Denmark's sovereignty over
the Arctic is an open question.
All territorial claims depend on whether a feature is a rock or
an island.
Only an island gives fishing rights and a claim to the seabed
around it.
To be one, Stray Dog West would need to be a naturally formed
area of land recognised as fit for sustained human habitation and
remain above sea level at high tide.
As it stands just four metres above sea level, it could disappear
if the sea rises.
Stray Dog West is some 700 km from the North Pole and only four
km from Greenland's coast.
"Its location is more symbolic than anything else," Schmitt, 60,
told Reuters during a visit to Paris.
Oodaaq, one of its official predecessors as the world's most
northernmost point of land, was discovered in 1978 by a Danish
survey team.
Named after the Inuit who accompanied Robert Peary on his epic
attempts to reach the North Pole, Oodaaq is only a few hundred
metres south of Stray Dog West.
Like Oodaaq, Stray Dog West is a depositional feature - the result
of accumulated erosion material and land debris - not a tectonic
feature forged by earthplate movements or collisions.
This means it can be bulldozed by moving pack ice.
"It is poetically fitting that the world's last point of land is
the most lacking in substance," said Schmitt, a US citizen.
But if his latest discovery survives long enough, Schmitt says
Stray Dog West could be added to world maps which are being redrawn
by climate change.
Warming Island, a rugged piece of land near the eastern coast of
Greenland shaped like three fingers pointing north, was included in
this month's revised Oxford University Press Atlas.
Schmitt found the ice bridge that connected it to the coastline had
melted.
"There must be several Warming Islands out there, other points of
land we thought connected to the land that are not," said Henrik
Hojmark Thomsen from the Geological Survey of Denmark and
Greenland, a research and advisory institute.
This summer, Norwegian explorer Boerge Ousland discovered that
Northbrook Island, part of the Franz Joseph Land archipelago off
Russia, was not one but two islands.
