Canadian and American scientists are claiming success in a joint expedition to map the Arctic sea floor that they say took them to areas that have never been mapped before.
Researchers aboard the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Healy and the Canadian icebreaker Louis St. Laurent are ecstatic over the trip, which penetrated even further north than originally planned and revealed undersea features previously unknown to science.
"Every moment up here is a bit of a eureka because it's unexplored," said the Louis' chief scientist David Mosher, speaking from on board the ship. "It's all incredibly new to us."
It's the second summer the countries are collaborating on such research, as Canada readies its claim for jurisdiction over parts of the ocean under the United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea.
But the trip to the ice-choked Beaufort Sea and the Canada Basin in the western Arctic, which reached as high as 84 degrees north, won't affect a long-running dispute between the two countries over a resource-rich part of that area.
"The two ships did not collect joint data in the disputed area," said Jacob Verhoef, the head of Canada's Arctic mapping project. "All the data collected was outside the disputed economic zones of Canada and the U.S."
The two countries disagree over how the border should be extended from the land between the Yukon and Alaska, creating uncertainty around a wedge-shaped area of the Beaufort Sea. The area is thought to hold significant energy reserves.
Still, there were remarkable findings on the trip, including an undersea mountain rising a kilometre up from a vast plain and a drowned volcano buried under two kilometres of sediments.
Scientists also found sea floor sediments much further north than previously known. Sediments are one of the indicators of a continental shelf, which could bolster claims from Canada and the U.S. for control over the region.
However, data from this summer's journey is a long way from defining how much of the Arctic sea floor the two countries could claim or how they might manage any of the resources that come with it.
"We're really so far away from that," said Maggie Hayes, director of the U.S. Office of Ocean and Polar Affairs. "Right now, we're trying to figure out what the geographic area is where we have these resources, then we have to figure out what the resources are."
The two countries are already planning a third joint expedition next summer to continue the undersea mapping. Canada has until 2013 to file a complete claim for parts of the Arctic sea floor it hopes to control.
