It's cold - but it's mine. I say so...

It’s specifically the combination of geology with fossils in which the continental shelf finds a monetary value. Over many hundreds of millions of years, prehistoric zooplankton and algae, very tiny organisms, have died and settled to the bottom of seas and oceans – mixed with mud and in the absence of oxygen this material is covered with heavy layers of sediment and pressed into the earth. In the cases where this material has been buried deep enough, heat from the earth’s crust will cause the tiny dead creatures to be chemically changed into oil – and if this oil is trapped beneath a layer of harder, denser rock, holding the lighter oil underneath, it forms into an oil deposit.

Over the long periods of time involved, various other minerals have been trapped in the continental shelf. The oceanic crust, in comparison, is not old enough for this process to have occurred, it is new rock, rising up as lava from great volcanic rifts in the earth as to cool and harden into rock such as basalt. The interest in the continental shelf, is to a large extent an interest in oil and other natural resources.

While it seems that the legal framework is in place to drive a claim from one of the five nations adjacent to the Arctic region, UNCLOS itself appears to be not much more than a slight update of laws from the 1700’s in which countries were given jurisdiction over coastal waters to the extent of three nautical miles – or using the measurement of the time - the distance that a cannon could fire from shore.

For more information

UN - Oceans and the Law of the Sea
http://www.un.org/Depts/los/index.htm

Energy Bulletin - Global Warming exposes Arctic to oil and gas drilling
http://www.energybulletin.net/3072.html