At UN As Pitch Made for Arctic Shelf, "Death by Power Point" in Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf Asserted, City Under Ice

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, February 9 -- The UN, particularly its 1B basement area, is full of closed meetings these days. But one stood out from the others on February 9, with a team of two dozen in suits ready to make a pitch for a piece of the Arctic.

   It was the closed door meeting of the  UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, a body Inner City Press has previously covered, for example on controversies surrounding claims to Somalia's shelf, see here.

  The February 9 session, which was moved from Conference Room 6 to 5 and in which a more than hour and a half presentation was made about the Lomonosov Ridge and other areas, has economic consequences. Denmark, through “its” Greenland, made a pitch in 2014.

  This pitch was longer -- one attendee whispered to Inner City Press is was like “death by Point Point” -- but the area claimed is larger, too, it was argued afterward.

   Last month the US television network CBS promoted an old segment by Walter Cronkite, promoting a US “City Under the Ice” in Greenland complete with a nuclear power plant. That worked out badly, no one even wanting the decommissioned power plant in the end. But the hunger for the Arctic is back: Cities Under Ice, indeed....