Denmark to lay official claim to North Pole
Baku, May 17 (AZERTAC). A leaked draft of a Danish strategic plan for the Arctic says Denmark will make an official claim to the North Pole by 2014, local media reported Tuesday.
"The Kingdom (of Denmark) is expected to claim the continental shelf at five sites around the Faroe Islands and Greenland, including the North Pole," says a joint Danish, Greenlandic and Faroese strategy for the development of the Arctic region over the next 10 years.
The comment was cited by Danish daily newspaper Information, which obtained a leaked draft of the document.
According to Information, similar claims have been voiced by Danish politicians in the past, but this is the first time the Danish government is officially stating that involvement in the North Pole is part of its policy objectives.
Greenland, which extends far into the Arctic Circle, and the Faroe Islands, located high in the North Atlantic, are both autonomously administered territories of Denmark.
It appears Denmark`s claim will be sent for consideration by the United Nations in 2014 at the latest, the newspaper said.
However, the draft does not indicate further reasons why the claim on the North Pole is important for Denmark.
Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen neither confirmed nor denied the claim when asked to elaborate on it by journalists at his weekly press conference Tuesday, in Copenhagen.
"We have different claims in the Arctic area but we are working on that together with Greenland and the Faroes, and we will not disclose what those claims are at the present time," Rasmussen said.
The Arctic is bordered by five countries, including Denmark (through Greenland) and world powers the United States and Russia. It is considered a region of strategic importance with potentially large, unexploited reserves of minerals, oil and gas.
In fact, news of the leaked document follows a multilateral meeting of the eight Arctic Council member states in Nuuk, capital of Greenland, that ended Thursday.
However, Information wrote the seabed below the North Pole itself is not expected to be rich in either oil or gas, and that a sea-depth of over 4.3 kilometers would make natural resource recovery difficult.
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