I'll bet they ask nicely too.
They must think there is something under all that ice and water.
I ain't worried about it.
All we have to do to keep those guys busy is tell the people in Detroit they are giving away free beer.
Notice they conveniently skirt past the North Pole.
It's all symbolic at this point anyway.
Some time this week, Canada is expected to make its case to the world to dramatically expand its boundaries by an area equivalent to the size of all three Prairie provinces.
Canada's deadline is Friday to apply to a United Nations commission for exclusive rights to what is likely to be another 1.7 million square kilometres of Arctic seafloor. The application under the Convention on the Law of the Sea will be the culmination of a decade of work and more than $200 million in public money.
The lines on the map will have been drawn by scores of scientists working everywhere from Ottawa labs to ice camps off the northern shores of Ellesmere Island, peering under the stormy black waters to discern the shape and composition of sea floor thousands of metres below.
With the co-operation of three Arctic neighbours — Denmark, Russia and the United States — more than 18,000 kilometres of sea-floor data was collected from a part of the globe less familiar than the surface of the moon.
"It was a huge effort and enormously challenging," said Michael Byers, an expert on Arctic and international law at the University of British Columbia.
The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea governs which nations exert what kinds of controls over their surrounding waters. In addition to the 22-kilometre territorial waters and the 370-kilometre exclusive economic zones, coastal countries are allowed to claim additional sea floor if they can show their continental shelf extends beyond the economic zone.
It's kind of funny in a historical context that there are still turf wars going on in this day and age trying to carve up what's left of this planet, even if it is completely useless arctic desert.
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