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On February the 9th the minister of natural resources and ecology of Russian Federation Sergey Donskoy presented to U.N.O. an application for expansion of economic zone of Russia in Arctic Ocean. Moscow claims to 1,2 million square kilometers of continental shelf.

There are billions of tons of fuel in the subsoil of the Arctic, and glacier ablation allows to clear new trade ways on Arctic Ocean. This is exactly why many countries are intending to fight for the right of setting up control over the arctic territories. Russia among them.

On February the 9th the minister of Natural Resources and Ecology of Russian Federation Sergey Donskoy presented to U.N.O. an application for expansion of economic zone of Russia in Arctic Ocean. The first version of the application, that was submitted in 2001, was declined by the international organization appealing to the lack of evidence base.

After that for more than 10 years Russia has been making geological-geophysical surveys. The specialists thoroughly studied Mendeleev’s submarine rise and Lomonosov’s crest.

According to Russian official establishment, the second version of the application contains enormous aggregation of scientific data. It is assumed, that it might take U.N.O several years to study the data.

Let’s recall that Russia claims to carbonaceous offshore areas, however its application was declined due to lack of presented information. New expeditions to the North Pole, seismic and geological-geophysical surveys in Arctic Ocean on studies of geological nature of Mendeleev’s submarine rise and Lomonosov’s crest, also bathymetric survey allowed to form big evidence base.

If mentioned areas be considered extension of continental shelf of Russia, the country will have priority right to its development. According to the data of Russian Ministry of Nature, hydrocarbon resources here make 4,9 billion of tons of reference fuel.

As Donskoy emphasized before, Russian application possesses a right of advancement of application, since it was studied by U.N.O commission in 2002.

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