Earth Equity News

In Arctic Sea, Nations Rush to Claim the Spoils of Global Warming. By Zachary Colle, SFChronicle, August 12, 2008. "It's a scramble for the spoils of global warming as the rapid melting of Arctic sea ice is opening access to previously unreachable deposits of oil and gas, setting off a race by northern nations -- including the U.S., Canada and Russia -- to claim them. The [scramble will be made visible] this week as the Coast Guard cutter Healy sails north from Barrow, Alaska, on Thursday to map the sea floor of the Chukchi Cap, an area at the northern edge of the Beaufort Sea. The maps could bolster U.S. claims to the area as part of its extended outer continental shelf. The U.S. Geological Survey confirmed last month what the oil industry had long suspected… that the area north of the Arctic Circle may hold as much as 90 billion barrels of oil and 1,669 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, or roughly 13% of the world's total undiscovered oil and 30% of the undiscovered natural gas. The dash to stake out territory across the Arctic has accelerated since Russia sent one of its submarines last August to plant the country's flag on the sea floor beneath the North Pole, provoking an outcry by other nations that viewed it as an unauthorized land grab."