ICE BREAKER about tapping the Arctic’s abundant oil and gas reserves. CHALLENGE: U.S. and European oil companies have long fantasized
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IN OCTOBER 2014, the Yamal, a Russian nuclear icebreaker with enormous shark teeth painted on its bow, rammed through the thick ice at the North Pole as a research vessel followed behind it, firing its seismic guns. Its multiyear mission: find oil and natural gas and help claim the Arctic sea bottom in Moscow’s name. In January, as Russian scientists were finalizing the test results, one of the mission’s leaders was elated as he stood before a rapt audience in Tromsø, a stunningly beautiful Arctic city in Norway. “We assure you, there is oil there,” said Gennady Ivanov of Russia’s Marine Arctic Geological Expedition. “And the oil is recoverable,” he noted later, in response to a question.
U.S. and European oil companies have long fantasized about tapping the Arctic’s abundant reserves; the U.S. Geological Survey estimates they make up to 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil and 30 percent of its natural gas. Now, as rising temperatures cause more ice to melt, which is clearing Arctic seas, the trillion-dollar race to own the region’s riches is on. In 2012, Russia tried to claim 460,000 square miles of Arctic ocean floor—an area the size of France and Spain—as national territory. Moscow did so as part of a treaty called the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which allows countries to expand the undersea area where they own mineral rights beyond the currently recognized 200-mile limit.