Lomonosov back
The Lomonosov Ridge is an oceanic ridge in the Arctic Ocean about 1800 km long . It runs from the New Siberian Islands across the central part of the ocean under the geographic North Pole to Ellesmere Island near Greenland . The width of the back varies between 60 and 200 km. It rises 3300 to 3700 m above the sea floor. The shallowest depth of the ridge is 954 m.
Discovery and Exploration
The Lomonosov Ridge was discovered by a Soviet expedition in 1948 and named after Mikhail Lomonosov .
After through holes obtained current knowledge it is not the Lomonosov Ridge is a oceanic deep back and part of an oceanic plate such as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge , but one of the continents separated part of the continental crust and part of a continental plate . Scientists suspect that the cause of the separation was the formation of the gakkel ridge, which is an oceanic ridge.
geology
In 2017, an expedition of the British Geological Society took several rock samples from a water depth of two to three and a half kilometers from the Lomonosov Ridge at two different positions with the help of a drill ship. The material contained mainly sediments that were under the influence of green schist about 470 million years ago , as shown by potassium-argon dating of detritic muscovite single grains. The scientists deduced from this that the mountains originated in the middle Ordovician , which would fit with folding processes on northern Ellesmere Island, on Svalbard and other parts of the Caledonian belt . The zirconium geochronological investigation revealed that the sediments came from the older to middle Proterozoic , with a particularly large amount of material being determined to be around 1.6 billion years old, which indicates the dating of similar rocks from eastern Greenland , northern Norway , Estonia and the Russian Arctic island of Novaya Zemlya . A second borehole produced sand and silt rock, which was also dated to the older Proterozoic, with some zircons from the Archean . Based on the analysis of a ferromanganese crust on all sediments, the scientists assumed that the sea floor was raised and eroded in the Miocene (five to about twenty million years ago). The researchers concluded that the Lomonosov Ridge was formed in the course of a major geological folding 470 million years ago, which stretched from Scotland and northern Scandinavia via Svalbard , the North Pole and northern Ellesmere to the Chukchi Peninsula .
Territorial claims of the Arctic countries
Russia
At the beginning of the 21st century, the geological structure of the ridge attracted international attention, as Russia made a petition to the UN in December 2001 under Article 76 paragraph 8 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea . In it, Russia proposed a new border for the Russian continental shelf beyond the 200-mile zone , but within the Russian Arctic sector . The area claimed in the input extends over a large part of the Arctic including the North Pole . One of the arguments cited was that the Lomonosov Ridge and the Mendeleev Ridge were extensions of the Eurasian continent . In 2002, the UN neither rejected nor accepted the Russian proposal, but called for further research. In June of the same year, Russian scientists claimed that the Lomonosov Ridge was an extension of Russian territory. Therefore, at the end of July 2007, a Russian expedition sent an icebreaker and two mini-submarines Mir-I and Mir-II to explore the depths.
Russian scientists anchored a stainless titanium Russian flag at a depth of 4,261 meters (14,000 feet) as a symbol of the claim to the area. Another Russian expedition was planned for November 2007.
In mid-September 2007, the Russian Ministry of Natural Resources issued the following press release: “On September 20, preliminary results of a profile analysis of the Earth's crust model during the 'Arctic 2007' expedition were obtained, which confirm that the structure of the crust of the Lomonosov Ridge is the same worldwide corresponds to known analogies of the continental crust and is therefore part of the continental shelf of the Russian Federation. "
In October 2014, the Russian Environment Minister Sergei Donskoy confirmed that his country in the Arctic claimed an additional area of around 1.2 million square kilometers for exclusive economic use. The area is believed to contain around five billion tons of oil and gas reserves.
Denmark and Canada
Also Danish researchers are trying to prove that the Lomonosov Ridge is an extension of Greenland, which Denmark claims to the territory would. Canada , which has also filed claims, claims based on its own seismic and sonar measurements that the ridge is an extension of its own continental shelf .
In December 2014 Denmark applied to the UN to declare an area of 895,000 square kilometers around the Lomonosov Ridge as an extension of the Greenland pedestal and thus as its national territory, since Denmark represents Greenland in international affairs.
Individual evidence
- ↑ http://www.planet-erde.de/aktuelles/planeterde-news/hahnenkampf-mit-wissenschaftlichen-nutzen Hahnenkampf with scientific benefit on planet-erde.de
- ↑ http://a76.dk/greenland_uk/north_uk/gr_n_expeditions_uk/lorita-1_uk/index.html The Continental Shelf Project , LORITA-1, 2006
- ↑ http://sp.lyellcollection.org/content/early/2017/08/16/SP460.17
- ↑ BBC News: Russia plants flag under N Pole
- ↑ The struggle for raw materials - Moscow plans new Arctic expedition , SpiegelOnline, Wissenschaft, August 8, 2007
- ↑ http://de.rian.ru/science/20070920/80076210.html Russian information and news agency Novosti
- ↑ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/11782413/Russia-claims-resource-rich-swathe-of-Arctic-territory.html
- ↑ Christoph Seidler: Danish application to the UN: A piece of the North Pole, please! Spiegel Online, December 15, 2014, accessed December 15, 2014 .