UK plans to annex south Atlantic

[synergy777]

http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=7265

UK plans to annex south Atlantic

Owen Bowcott – The Guardian September 22, 2007

Britain is preparing territorial claims on tens of thousands of square miles of the Atlantic Ocean floor around the Falklands, Ascension Island and Rockall in the hope of annexing potentially lucrative gas, mineral and oil fields, the Guardian has learned.

The UK claims, to be lodged at the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, exploit a novel legal approach that is transforming the international politics of underwater prospecting.

Britain is accelerating its process of submitting applications to the UN - which is fraught with diplomatic sensitivities, not least with Argentina - before an international deadline for registering interests.

Relying on detailed geological and geophysical surveys by scientists and hydrographers, any state can delineate a new "continental shelf outer limit" that can extend up to 350 miles from its shoreline. Data has been collected for most of Britain's submissions and Chris Carleton, head of the law of the sea division at the UK Hydrographic Office and an international expert on the process, said preliminary talks on Rockall are being held in Reykjavik, Iceland, next week.

Mr Carleton believes the Falklands claim has the most potential for acrimonious political fallout. Britain and Argentina fought over the islands 25 years ago, and the value of the oil under the sea in the region is understood to be immense: seismic tests suggest there could be about 60bn barrels under the ocean floor.

Britain has been granted licences for exploratory drilling around the islands within the normal 200-mile exploration limit and any new claim to UNCLCS would extend territorial rights further into the Atlantic.

"It would be beyond the 200-mile limit but less than 350 miles," said Mr Carleton, who is involved in preparing the submission. "It effectively joins up the area around South Georgia to the Falklands. It's a claim but how it's handled has not been decided yet. The Argentinians will say it's not ours to claim. It's all a bit tricky."

Martin Pratt, director of research at Durham University's international boundaries research unit, added: "The Russians may be claiming the Arctic but the UK is claiming a large chunk of the Atlantic. Some states might ask why a big power is entitled to huge stretches of the ocean's resources thousands of miles away from its land, but that's the way the law is."

Because of the sensitivities - earlier this year Buenos Aires scrapped a 1995 agreement with the UK to share any oil found in the adjacent waters - the first formal application from the UK is likely to centre on Ascension.

The volcanic island, 1,000 miles from the African mainland, sits just to one side of the mid-Atlantic ridge. No gas or oil is likely to be found below the surrounding waters but there could be significant mineral deposits on the ocean floor.

Talks have already begun between Ireland, Iceland and Denmark for the division of rights far out into the north Atlantic. It includes the island of Rockall and the sub-sea Hatton ridge. The competing claims are nowhere near final resolution although Ireland and the UK have agreed a common boundary.

Other countries that have submitted claims to the ocean floors around remote overseas dependencies have run into fierce resentment from neighbouring nations. France, which this summer registered its claim to thousands of square miles around New Caledonia, in the Pacific, has received protests from Vanuatu warning that the claim has "serious implications and ramifications on Vanuatu's legal and traditional sovereignty". Russia was criticised this summer for making claims beneath the Arctic Ocean.

The UN body has been progressing slowly through its casework. The process of extending the normal 200-mile limit requires volumes of technical evidence of submarine soundings. According to the convention on the law of the sea, applicant states may register their rights by "establishing the foot of the continental slope, by meeting the requirements stated for the thickness of sedimentary rocks".

Once demarcated, the ocean floor may then be claimed up to 60 nautical miles from the bottom of the continental slope. When territorial rights have been obtained, states have the right to extract any minerals, natural gas or oil discovered in the annexed seabed.

There is a deadline of May 2009 for claims from the UK and other countries to be submitted, although states that ratified the treaty later have more time. "The amount of technical data required is massive," said Mr Pratt. "Australia recently submitted 80 volumes."

In the past, Greenpeace has described the process as a "land grab".


· This article was amended on Friday September 28 2007. About 60bn barrels of oil are estimated to be lying under the seabed around the Falkland Islands, not 60m, as we said in the article. This has been corrected.

www.guardian.co.uk/oil/story/0,,2174615,00.html

[hagbard_celine]

Originally Posted by synergy777

[Britain is preparing territorial claims on tens of thousands of square miles of the Atlantic Ocean floor around the Falklands, Ascension Island and Rockall in the hope of annexing potentially lucrative gas, mineral and oil fields,

Try reading my novel. I predicted this!

They're probably saying: "If Russia can do it, so can we!" And people still think that the Falklands War was all about freeing the people!

[synergy777]

post your novel bro, it would be great to read it.

russia want the north, uk the south, rumblings of resource wars are growing louder.

you would think argentina being the closet country to it would have more of a claim.

[hagbard_celine]

Originally Posted by synergy777

post your novel bro, it would be great to read it.

russia want the north, uk the south, rumblings of resource wars are growing louder.

you would think argentina being the closet country to it would have more of a claim.

My novel is on the Forum Talent board.

Yes, this could be a move against Russia; maybe it's a strategy to seize these resources before Peak Oil hits. I'm not sure. One things for sure: those poor deluded Falklanders will be in for a shock if the UK govt gives Argentina the islands. Do they really think that they sent the task force there in 1982 for the people's sake? They do! They have streets in Port Stanley named Thatcher Drive and H. Jones Close. If it becomes politically expediant from an oil point of view they'll let Argentina have them and do with them as it pleases!

[synergy777]

cool will have a look at your novel bro.

i think the peak oil is scam. i thought it was real, hubberts peak etc, then there was the russian alternative, saying its naturally replenishes itself, eg its made from compressed/crushed vegetation/animal matter, which sceintifically is true. i think its false scarcity/lifetsyle change, eg agenda 21, dismantling of the middle/working classes to introduce a two tier system, the elite and the serfs.

i also think climate change although affected by co2, is more directly affected by sun spot/solar discharge. after all if he source of heat increases it temperture/output, then of course there is going to be climate change. look at mars, climate change, polar caps etc. all planets are thorugh going climate change, if we discount factors of industry, eg mars has no suvs, lol, we can conclude the single variable which effects all planets is the sun. then when i looked into sun spot cycles, sir patrick moore/sky at night etc, its due to the sun. also as the earth heats up due to increased solar output, then ice will melt. this will cause the globe to shift/axis shift, as it compostion/weight changes, thus affecting gravity/planet alignment, which could see huge floods.

also with polar shift/photon belt, which we are moving into, its great changes.

http://curezone.com/blogs/fm.asp?i=985423

call it ascension, 2012, or cosmic shift. its happenig. the comos is itself a evolving enity, moving etc. the sun is increasing sunpot/flares, hence increased uv. so if the sun is changing, then i think the suns increase in temperature/activity is the main cause of climate change. although telling people about solar cycles will introduce huge panic, like the film sunshower. solar flares are bigger than the planet, like cosmic tsunmais

[hagbard_celine]

I've heard about the theory that oil, and even other minerals, naturaly replenish themselves. Brian Desborough writes about it in his books. It's as if the Earth's body heals and regenerates in the same way that our own bodies do.

If this is true then Peak Oil is definitely an illusion. However because so many poeple believe in it and oil's scarcity, it will have an economic effect; perhaps by design!