US-Canadian mission set to map Arctic seafloor Monday, 02 August 2010 02:25

ANCHORAGE, Alaska: US and Canadian scientists are headed far north on a joint mission to map the still mysterious floor of the Arctic Ocean, as questions of sovereignty and mineral rights swirl around the region.

The five-week mission, the third joint expedition in as many years, employs two powerful icebreakers from the nations’ Coast Guard fleets.

Both are scheduled to depart today, from ports in Alaska and Canada’s Nunavut territory respectively, for a rendezvous point at sea, said the US Geological Survey, a participating agency.

The program seeks to help both nations determine how far north they may extend their sovereignty, a potentially lucrative right in an era of melting Arctic sea ice and worldwide demand for the oil, natural gas and other minerals believed to lie beneath the seafloor.

Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, coastal nations have sovereignty out to 200 nautical miles (370 km) from their shorelines, including rights to the minerals and natural resources there, the USGS says.

If the nations can prove there is an extended underwater continental shelf, they may be able to claim sovereignty beyond 200 nautical miles.

The Arctic Ocean’s international lure was highlighted in 2007 when explorers from Russia - which has made disputed sovereignty claims in the region - traveled by mini-submarine to plant a Russian flag on the North Pole seabed, about 14,000 feet (4,300 meters) underwater.

New this year for the US-Canadian mission will be the first joint seabed surveys in an area of the Beaufort Sea where the two countries have competing sovereignty claims. They have yet to agree on a maritime border in the region.

Wherever the US-Canada border winds up “could be a fairly valuable decision” because that portion of the Beaufort Sea includes extensions of the petroleum-rich Mackenzie River Delta, said Jonathan Childs, a USGS marine geophysicist leading the mission’s seismic data operations team.

But the border’s location will not be the concern of scientists. They will focus on collecting sound data to help map the sea floor and using seismic tools to determine sediment thickness.

“That’s up to the diplomats,” Childs said. “It’s not a scientific decision at all.”

For this mapping mission, the guiding principal appears to be cooperation. Childs, for example, will be be stationed on the Canadian icebreaker, the Louis S St-Laurent.

It and the US cutter Healy, the largest US Coast Guard icebreaker, will work in tandem, switching lead positions as they plow though the icy water.

The aim is to sail to 84 degrees latitude, within 360 miles (579 km) of the North Pole, Childs said. That would be farther north than past two years’ voyages, he said.

The mission coincides with the seasonal disappearance of sea ice in the Arctic, which typically hits its minimum in September.

Sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean as of July 15 was about 16 percent lower than the average extent recorded between 1979 and 2000, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.

Particularly ominous is the deterioration of the ice quality, said Childs, who traveled the region in 1992, a time of different conditions. “The ice has been getting much thinner and the age of the ice has reduced quite substantially,” he said.

“Now it’s unusual to encounter ice that’s more than two years old.”

One of two cooling systems serving the International Space Station’s US, European and Japanese laboratories broke down, setting off a wave of equipment shutdowns to cut the amount of heat generated on board, NASA officials said yesterday.

The three Russian cosmonauts and three NASA astronauts aboard the station are not in any danger, NASA’s flight controllers said in a statement.

The crew, which was asleep at the time, were roused by alarms about 8 pm EDT yesterday and immediately set to work powering down equipment to prevent the sole remaining cooling loop from overloading.

The shutdown, however, means that many systems aboard the station are now without working backups.“It’s pretty clear that we’re going to want to have a course of action to take as quickly as possible. This is not something we want to linger over, said NASA spokesman Rob Navias at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

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