US rushes icebreaker to counter Ruskie threat to North Pole

uploaded by gryphon August 10, 2007 at 03:21 pm
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US rushes icebreaker to counter Ruskie threat to North Pole by gryphon

News that the US government is rushing a Coast Guard icebreaker to the north to coutner Russia's claim to the North Pole will surely annoy Canadians.

The Healy icebreaker of the U.S. Coast Guard Service leaves Seattle Monday to go to the Arctic Ocean for research mission.

The Healy is one of the three heavy Arctic icebreakers operated by the United States.

Meanwhile Canada is beginning to realize that it made a huge blunder when it cancelled plans back in 1980 to build a super icebreaker - a ship that would have defended its claims to its Arctic islands.

In the wake of last week's controversial but impressive Russian flag-planting expedition to the North Pole seabed, and amid rising tensions between five polar nations -- Canada, the U.S., Russia, Norway and Denmark -- over the future ownership of the huge oil and gas deposits that lie beneath the Arctic Ocean seafloor, the Polar 8 would have given Canada a serious upper hand in the emerging scientific, economic and diplomatic battle for the Arctic.

And now it appears Denmark is also rushing in to bolster its sovereignty claims to the north.

According to The Daily Mail, "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 plough through ice as thick as 16 feet in the area north of Greenland"