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U.S. Icebreaker to Map Arctic Sea Floor, but 'No Flag-Dropping' Planned

Posted on: Saturday, 11 August 2007, 00:17 CDT

SEATTLE (AP) - A U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker is headed to the Arctic to map the sea floor off Alaska as Canada, Russia and Denmark assert their claims in the polar region, which has potential oil and gas reserves.

The lead scientist on the expedition scoffs at the political implications.

"We're basically just doing science," said Larry Mayer, director of the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping at the University of New Hampshire. "There's no flag-dropping on this trip," he said in an interview from Durham, N.H.

The Healy left Puget Sound on Monday and should be in Barrow around Aug. 17, said Russ Tippets, a spokesman at the coast guard Pacific area office in San Francisco. Mayer will meet the Seattle-based icebreaker Healy at Barrow, Alaska, and head about 800 kilometres north with a team of about 20 scientists to map an area known as the Chukchi Cap.

Russian media assert that the Healy's mission signals that the United States, along with Canada, is actively joining the competition for resources in the Arctic. Melting ice could open water for drilling or create the long-sought Northwest Passage for shipping. A Russian submarine dropped that country's flag Aug. 2 on the floor of the Arctic Ocean under the North Pole.

Mayer denied the reports. "We've had this trip planned for months, and it has nothing to do with the Russians planting their flag," he said.

The mission will last a couple of months, and it is due back in Seattle in early October, said spokesman Stephen Elliott.

The purpose of the mapping work aboard the Healy is to determine the extent of the continental shelf north of Alaska, Mayer said. It's not a claim, he said, but a process of registering boundary information with the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf.

"In that area, the country would have rights over the resources of the sea floor and subsurface that would include drilling for oil and gas," he said.

The mapping is conducted with an echo sounder, something that's difficult to hear when a ship is crunching through the ice, Mayer said. This is the third such mapping trip. The others were in 2003 and 2004.

Source: Canadian Press

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