The Race That Is a Queue

On 2 August 2007 two Russian submersibles, Mir-1 and Mir-2, descended more than four kilometres to the seabed beneath the North Pole, and one of them planted a titanium Russian flag there. The expedition was led by Artur Chilingarov, a polar explorer and member of the Duma, and the pictures went round the world as the opening shot of a race for the Arctic.

Canada's foreign minister, Peter MacKay, answered that this was not the fifteenth century and that nobody could go around the world planting flags and claiming territory. He was right about the law. The flag had no legal effect whatsoever.

To see why, you need the part of the convention that deals with the seabed rather than the water.

Every coastal state has a continental shelf out to two hundred nautical miles, whatever the geology. Beyond that, a state may claim more seabed only where its continental shelf physically continues, as a natural prolongation of its land territory, and then only within outer limits set by distance from the coast and by the depth of the seabed. Proving that is a matter of geology and bathymetry, the measurement of the sea floor, and it takes years of survey work in some of the most difficult waters on earth.

The evidence goes to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, a body of twenty-one scientists elected by the parties to the convention. The commission does not award territory. It examines the data and makes recommendations, and limits a state sets on the basis of those recommendations are final and binding. It does not decide between states whose claims overlap. That is left to them.

What is at stake is specific. The extended shelf gives rights to the seabed and what lies beneath it: oil, gas, minerals, and creatures that live on the bottom. It gives no rights to the water above it or the fish swimming there, which beyond two hundred miles remain high seas. And seabed that no state can claim as shelf belongs to what the convention calls the Area, the common heritage of mankind, administered by an international authority.

Now the claims.

Russia made the first submission any state made to the commission, in 2001, and revised its Arctic claim in 2015 with far more survey data. Denmark, on behalf of Greenland, filed in 2014, claiming about 895,000 square kilometres running across the Pole to the edge of Russia's economic zone. Canada filed its Arctic submission in 2019. All three claims include the North Pole, and the feature at the centre of the overlap is the Lomonosov Ridge, an underwater mountain chain that each side argues is a natural prolongation of its own landmass.

That sounds like a collision. In practice it has been a queue. The commission's backlog is measured in years, overlapping claims will be settled by negotiation after it has spoken, and none of the states involved has tried to settle anything by force.

The reason is not virtue, and that is the interesting part.

In May 2008 the five Arctic coastal states, Russia, Canada, Denmark, Norway and the United States, met at Ilulissat in Greenland and declared that the law of the sea already provided the framework they needed and that they saw no need for a new legal regime for the Arctic Ocean. They had good reason to like the existing one. It gives coastal states the seabed. A new treaty, of the kind some environmental groups were proposing, might have given less.

Even the United States, which has never ratified the convention, has followed its method. In December 2023 it published the outer limits of its own extended continental shelf, about a million square kilometres across several regions including the Arctic, drawn using the convention's criteria.

There is a small coda that sums up the region's habits. For decades Canada and Denmark disputed Hans Island, a barren rock between Greenland and Ellesmere Island, in a contest conducted mainly by visiting officials who left flags and bottles of spirits for the other side to find. In June 2022 they settled it by drawing a line across the island and splitting it roughly in half.

None of this means the Arctic is safe from conflict. Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 froze much of the region's cooperation, and the seven other members of the Arctic Council paused their work with Russia that March. Melting ice is opening sea routes and making resources easier to reach. The rules have held while the stakes were mostly theoretical.

But the lesson connects this chapter to the two before it. A legal order holds best where it hands the strongest parties what they would otherwise try to take. In the Arctic the convention gives the coastal states the seabed, so they defend the convention. In the South China Sea it gives a smaller neighbour rights the strongest party wants for itself, and that is where it is tested. Whether a rule holds depends less on its wording than on whom it rewards.