U.S. Extends Claims In Arctic, Tells Canada "Santa Is American, Eh"

The second half of the headline is fāke™ news. It is actually Canada claiming the North Pole.

Rest is fine.

From Bloomberg via the Anchorage Daily News, December 22:

U.S. claims huge chunk of seabed amid strategic push for resources

The U.S. extended its claims on the ocean floor by an area twice the size of California, securing rights to potentially resource-rich seabeds at a time when Washington is ramping up efforts to safeguard supplies of minerals key to future technologies.

The so-called Extended Continental Shelf covers about 1 million square kilometers (386,100 square miles), predominantly in the Arctic and Bering Sea, an area of increasing strategic importance where Canada and Russia also have claims. The U.S. has also declared the shelf’s boundaries in the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf of Mexico.

The long-awaited announcement earlier this week maps the outer reaches of the U.S. continental shelf, the country’s land territory under the sea. Under international law, countries have economic rights to natural resources on, and under, the seabed floor based on the boundaries of their continental shelves.

“It’s a huge deal because it’s a huge amount of territory,” said Rebecca Pincus, director of the Polar Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington, which has devoted an entire web page to the ramifications of this week’s news. “It’s U.S. sovereignty over the seabed floor, and so whether it’s seabed mining, or oil and gas leasing, or cables, or what have you, the U.S. is announcing the borders of its ECS and will have sovereignty over those decisions.”

The U.S. State Department said that the development “is about geography, not resources.”....

(click to enlarge)

....MUCH MORE

Unfortunately for the Americans, the state of their polar power projection is akin to a joke from the 1986 oil price collapse, when WTI dropped below $9.85 from $23.30 six months earlier and $35 in 1981:

Investor: I'm getting nervous, I'm hearing bankruptcy rumors about everybody in the patch, how slow is it?

Oil CEO: Well, we're down to two hookers, and one of them's a virgin.

Investor: Oh.

The U.S. has one heavy icebreaker which has been kept in service by cannibalizing its twin for parts and which the U.S. has been very reluctant to send into the deep arctic for fear they would have to call upon the Russians to come to the rescue should it get stuck in the ice. 

(not kidding) 

If interested, here is the executive summary of "The Outer Limits of the Extended Continental Shelf of the United States of America" (100 page PDF)