A pair of red-hulled icebreakers -- one Canadian, one American -- will batter their way north into uncharted, ice-infested waters next week, seeking to buttress claims to the vast undersea riches at the top of the world.
"We're headed into the Beaufort Sea, as far north as the ice allows," said Jacob Verhoef, the National Resources Canada scientist spearheading Ottawa's effort to map, and eventually claim, a vast swath of the Arctic.
Data gathered by both ships will be shared, but there's no guarantee that the two countries won't eventually be at loggerheads with overlapping claims.
"This really is uncharted territory -- we have better maps of the moon," said Captain Steve Barnum, the U.S. chief hydrographer.
The joint expedition, the second in two summers, by the Canadian Coast Guard's best but aging icebreaker, Louis St. Laurent, and the more modern and powerful U.S. coast guard icebreaker, Healy, will map the underwater extension of North America, the continental shelf.
For both countries -- as for the other polar-basin states including Russia, Denmark and Norway -- defining and mapping the continental shelf underpins rival claims to the Arctic.
Decades of unfulfilled promises by both governments have left Canada and the United States strapped for even modestly capable icebreakers, so this summer's joint two-ship expedition reflects a practical reality as much as a spirit of cooperation.
The two icebreakers can work in tandem, one breaking a path for the other, and can extricate each other if one gets beset.
Neither country has even a single polar-class icebreaker, unlike the nuclear-powered fleet of Russian vessels that are capable of slicing a path to the North Pole. Other Russian icebreakers, on charter, routinely carry tourists through the Northwest Passage claimed by Canada.
In the thinning summer ice, the Canadian and American ships will take turns clearing a path on the month-long mapping expedition. The Healy will map the seafloor, while the Louis St. Laurent will tow seismic gear that measures sediment depth, which will be critical when both countries file claims under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Meanwhile, the two icebreakers won't start their joint survey until they are at least 200 nautical miles from the coast. Within that zone, the two countries already dispute a long, triangular-shaped area: Canada claims that the international boundary runs due north out into the sea along the 141st west meridian, while Washington contends that the maritime boundary should extend equidistant from the coast.
"The dispute exists, but it is well managed, and we are focusing our effort on co-operation," said Caterina Ventura, Canada's Foreign Affairs acting director of the oceans and environmental law division.
Officials of both countries were keen to avoid discussing the existing bilateral maritime disputes.
The current effort is aimed at determining "where is the edge of the continental shelf off Alaska," said Maggie Hayes, the senior State Department official who chairs the multi-agency effort building a U.S. Arctic claim. "We have never had a request (from Canada) for that data."
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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