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Canada and Denmark claim pieces of the Arctic

Denmark and Greenland have submitted Arctic claims to the UN, Canada will apply this week. (Illustration from Wikipedia)

Canada is soon expected to apply to the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf for exclusive rights to 1.7 million square kilometers of Arctic sea floor. Denmark and Greenland submitted their claim last week.

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Canada’s deadline is Friday to apply to the commission for exclusive rights to what is likely to be another 1.7 million square kilometers of Arctic sea floor. The application under the Convention on the Law of the Sea will be the culmination of a decade of work and more than $200 million in public money.

Collection of data for the application has required more than a dozen icebreaker voyages, as well as trips by helicopters, airplanes and an unmanned, remote-controlled submarine that spent days under the ice, Leader-Post writes.

Denmark and Greenland last week submitted a claim for 62,000 square kilometers of Arctic sea floor, reports Politiken newspaper. The claim is the fourth of five that Denmark is expected to submit before a deadline in 2014 which in total could expand Denmark’s territory by around a million square kilometers.

Politiken reports that other Arctic countries have also submitted claims that overlap Denmark’s and with around 50 cases currently being processed, they may have to wait until 2019 for a verdict.

Norway in 2009 became the first Arctic nation to settle an agreement with the U.N. Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf in the north. Norway’s newly defined continental shelf in the north covers 235,000 square kilometers or three-quarters the size of mainland Norway.