If you find yourself flying over the Arctic Circle during your travels this winter and beyond, and the sky is clear, you’ll probably see a lot of featureless whiteness along the northern horizon, where the sea ice replaces the blue of the open ocean.
If you think it’s like that all the way to the North Pole – well, yes, correct! But if that ice wasn’t there…you’d get a glimpse of something incredible, on a scale that would blow your mind.
To set the scene, let’s chase solid land as northwards as it goes.
In the middle of 2021, a group of researchers announced they might have found the world’s most northerly island, off the top of Greenland. The unofficial name for this 30 x 60 metre something-or-other is Qeqertaq Avannarleq, which is Greenlandic for “the northernmost island.” From the air, it looks like – and I apologise, but there’s no avoiding it – a huge dollop of cow dung.
The researchers who discovered it ended up there by accident – they were planning to take samples from another candidate for the Earth’s most northernmost piece of land, Oodaaq, sitting around 780 metres away.
After continuing to investigate the maybe-island – a complicated job, as the sea around it is permanently covered with a layer of ice up to 3 metres thick – in 2023 they found evidence of water flowing underneath, and no sign that Qeqertaq Avannarleq was physically connected to the sea bed by anything except ice.
The researchers now agree that Qeqertaq Avannarleq isn’t an island – it’s just an unusually befouled iceberg. At some point, the immense pressure of the surrounding sea ice pressed a particularly big chunk up against a lovely pile of filth (gravel, soil, mud and other detritus, perhaps depositing by landslides) and then that mucky ice slowly tumbled & bobbed its way to the surface.
This is not a new thing for this region – these dirty faux-islets appear and disappear all the time – but this time, the hype had clearly got a little too far ahead of the science.
But here’s something amazing that turned out to be very real – with dramatic consequences for the future of the Arctic as a whole.
It starts with Mikhail Lomonosov (1711-1765): Russian polymath, scientist, writer – very much the Isaac Newton of his part of the world. Amongst other things, he discovered the law of conservation of mass in chemical reactions, he was the first to announce that Venus has an atmosphere, and he founded some of the key principles of modern geology. There’s a town named after him in the Petrodvortsovy district of Saint Petersburg, a lunar crater with his name, a Martian crater with his name (that’s just greedy) and even an asteroid too…
And at some point, as legend has it, he predicted there was something MASSIVE under the Arctic ice.
In 1948, a Soviet high-altitude expedition of scientists, pitching a camp on the Arctic ice sea, detected unusually shallow waters stretching northwards of Russia’s New Siberian Islands. The Soviet scientists found that across the whole of the Arctic Sea basin, flanked by mid-oceanic and volcanic ridges on either side, is a whoppingly huge belt of continental crust.
How huge?
No less than 1,800 kilometres (1,100 miles) long, and between 3.3km to 3.7km above the surrounding sea floor, for its whole length, getting to within 400 metres of the surface at its highest point!
To put this to scale, imagine a ridge of mountains as high as the Dolomites, with sides almost as steep, stretching from London (UK) to Belgrade (Serbia), or from Detroit to Houston – with a flattened top that’s up to 200km wide.
On dry land, this would be an absolutely incredible landmark – a standing tidal-wave of rock, dividing whatever continent it ran across. Millions of tourists would come to see it every year. You might have walked along it yourself, or dreamed of owning a little cottage in sight of it.
It’s now called the Lomonosov Ridge, in honour of the man who guessed its existence 200 years earlier. And now the three countries that border on it – Canada, Denmark (via Greenland) and Russia – are determined to lay claim to it. Each country is claiming it’s an extension of their continental shelf, as Martha Henriques explains at BBC Future here:
“As coastal nations, Russia, Denmark and Canada of course already have sovereign rights over the seafloor close to their own shores. Coastal countries can establish an Exclusive Economic Zone that stretches up to 200 nautical miles (370km) from shore, which gives them rights to activities like fishing, building infrastructure and extracting natural resources, under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. That law also permits a country to extend its rights over the seabed further – if there are seafloor features that they can prove are an extension of their continental shelves.
For such a seafloor feature to count in a country’s favour, there has to be evidence that it is a piece of submerged land – and not an oceanic ridge that has always been underwater and has little to do with the country’s land mass.
What [geologist Christian] Knudsen’s findings boil down to is evidence that the Lomonosov Ridge is indeed submerged land, and not formed from seafloor spreading, like the mid-Atlantic ridge that runs like a seam from Iceland down towards Antarctica.”
For decades now, its scientists have been working hard to establish the facts, to take to the United Nations to bolster their formal claims.
Extraordinarily, these claims have now become palaeogeological. It’s becoming not about where the ridge is today, but where it was, up to millions of years ago. (Imagine laying claim to a place based on its extremely ancient geological history! How messy could THAT get?)
All this didn’t stop Russia sending out an icebreaker & two mini-subs in 2007 to plant a rust-proof titanium flag on the seabed, 4,200m (14,000ft) deep. Sergei Balyasnikov of the Russian Arctic and Antarctic Institute issued a statement: “It’s a very important move for Russia to demonstrate its potential in the Arctic… It’s like putting a flag on the Moon.”
Other countries? Considerably less than impressed. “This isn’t the 15th Century,” said Canadian Foreign Minister Peter MacKay. “You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say ‘We’re claiming this territory’.” Yes, quite.
But of course a worrisome question hangs over all this. Is it going to be yet another flashpoint for future global conflicts, considering how that inaccessible (and protective?) polar ice is already melting?
It’s true that new seaways will open up, and the Lomonosov Ridge may contain mineral resources – including millions of barrels of oil – which every country would be more than happy to get their hands on (if that oil exists, which is far from certain).
But this is still, & will be for a long time, one of the harshest & therefore most expensive places for humans and their machines to linger on our planet. Expedition costs currently run upwards of US$250k every day. International cooperation is still vital for research to get underway in environmental conditions this arduous.
And of course Russia’s geopolitical focus is – shall we say – elsewhere right now.
All this means time. Time for the science, and time for all the right voices to be invited into the room, as Henriques notes:
“As climate change has escalated interest in the central Arctic, the Inuit Circumpolar Council has called for states to engage with Inuit and other indigenous groups and respect their rights. While the central Arctic seafloor might seem to have little to do with climate change (especially if any hydrocarbons there aren’t extracted), being seen to be an environmental “steward” or “protector” in the Arctic is something that Canada, Denmark and even Russia are pushing for.
Indigenous communities are increasingly acknowledged as a crucial part of sustainability, in the Arctic and elsewhere. “Though it’s far into the future, we still have to be mindful of the interconnected nature of the whole ocean and the coastal seas, as well as the potential threats for Inuit and other Arctic indigenous peoples, and the Arctic states,” says Dorough [Dalee Sambo Dorough, chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council].
It’s likely to be decades before there is an answer from the UN commission on the science that underpins all three countries’ claims. And it’s possible that the US still may submit a claim in the future, shifting the picture again. Norway, which claimed a more modest extended continental shelf excluding the pole, and with only a sliver of overlap with Denmark, has already had its recommendations from the UN.”
For now, the Arctic sea floor remains the site of one of the hidden wonders of the world, with much to reveal to the scientists of the future.
Let’s hope it remains that place of mystery and of wonder – and of nations remembering their most productive way forward is when they work together.