Canada Announces Arctic Base, Port

Icebergs are seen off Greenland's eastern coast in this July 17, 2007 file photo near the arctic circle. Danish scientists aboard powerful icebreakers head for the Arctic ice pack north of Greenland on Sunday Aug. 12, 2007 seeking evidence to position Denmark in a race to claim the potentially vast oil and other resources of the North Pole region. (AP Photo/John McConnico) (John Mcconnico - AP)

Global warming has raised the stakes in the scramble for sovereignty in the Arctic because shrinking polar ice could someday open up resource development and new shipping lanes.

Denmark said scientists would embark Sunday on a monthlong expedition seeking evidence that the Lomonosov Ridge, a 1,240-mile underwater mountain range, is attached to the Danish territory of Greenland, making it a geological extension of the Arctic island.

That might allow the Nordic nation to stake a claim under a U.N. treaty that could stretch all the way the North Pole. Canada and Russia also claim the ridge.

"The preliminary investigations done so far are very promising," Helge Sander, Denmark's minister of science, technology and innovation told Denmark's TV2 on Thursday. "There are things suggesting that Denmark could be given the North Pole."

The Danes plan to set off from Norway's remote Arctic islands of Svalbard aboard the Swedish icebreaker Oden, which will be assisted by a powerful Russian nuclear icebreaker to plow through ice as thick as 16 feet in the area north of Greenland.

"No one has ever sailed in that area. Ships have sailed on the edges of the ice but no one has been in there," the expedition leader, Christian Marcussen, said in Copenhagen. "The challenge for us will be the ice."

The team includes 40 scientists, 10 of them Danish, and the crews of the icebreakers, which will use sophisticated equipment, including sonar, to map the seabed under the ice.

Moscow claims the Lomonosov ridge is an extension of the Eurasian continent, and therefore part of Russia's continental shelf under international law. Russian researchers plan to use last week's dive to help map the ridge.

Canada and Denmark also both claim Hans Island, a half-square-mile rock at the entrance to the Northwest Passage. The island is wedged between Canada's Ellesmere Island and Danish-ruled Greenland, and has been a subject of bitter exchanges between the two NATO allies.

In 1984, Denmark's minister for Greenland affairs, Tom Hoeyem, caused a stir when he flew in on a chartered helicopter, raised a Danish flag on the island, buried a bottle of brandy at the base of the flagpole and left a note saying: "Welcome to the Danish island."

Last month, Harper announced that six to eight new navy patrol ships would be built to guard the Northwest Passage sea route in the Arctic

As global warming melts the passage _ which is navigable only during a slim window in the summer _ the waters are exposing unexplored resources, and becoming an attractive shipping route. Commercial ships can shave off some 2,480 miles from Europe to Asia compared with the current routes through the Panama Canal.

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Associated Press Writer Doug Mellgren contributed to this report from Oslo, Norway.