A US Coast Guard cutter will depart for the Arctic this week as part of a race against Russia to claim the vast spoils of oil and natural gas below the sea floor that both nations are scrambling to exploit.
The cutter Healy will leave Barrow, Alaska, tomorrow on a three-week journey to map the Arctic Ocean floor in a relatively unexplored area at the northern edge of the Beaufort Sea, in an attempt to bolster US claims to the area by proving that it is part of its extended outer continental shelf.
The rush to stake out territory across the Arctic has intensified since last August, when a Russian submarine planted the nation's flag on the sea floor beneath the North Pole, which was viewed as a provocative land grab.
That triggered an immediate response from the Canadian Government, which within a week announced that it was going to build two new military bases in the Arctic wilderness, a warning shot in the new Cold War over the far North's energy resources. The Healy will be joined by a Canadian icebreaker on September 6.
See a great piece about Energy Imperialism in the Arctic on Socialist Cephalopod