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MOSCOW — "We were there first and we can claim the entire Arctic, but if our neighbours like Canada want some part of it, then maybe we can negotiate with them," says Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the flamboyant Russian ultranationalist, who happily hands out pictures of a Russian flag sitting on the seabed at the North Pole.

Mr. Zhirinovsky, the populist leader of Russia's misnamed Liberal Democratic Party, is often derided in the West as an extremist xenophobe, but a clash over who controls the top of the world and the oil and gas beneath the Arctic seabed seems inevitable.

The Russians staked the North Pole as theirs and last summer dropped a flag on the seabed to prove it, much to the mocking outrage of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government.

"This isn't the 15th century. You can't go around the world and plant flags and say, 'We're claiming this territory,' " fumed former foreign minister Peter Mackay, who failed to mention that his predecessor had tromped ashore tiny and disputed Hans Island, claimed by both Canada and Denmark, and planted the Maple Leaf.

Supposedly cooler heads prevailed in Greenland this spring at a meeting of the five circumpolar countries: Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia and the United States. They agreed "to the orderly settlement of any possible overlapping claims" in a joint communiqué called the Ilulissat Declaration.

But the race to claim the top of the world and, more importantly, reap the vast bonanza of oil and gas believed to lie beneath the Arctic seabed is only just getting under way.

Since last summer's brouhaha, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has repeatedly tried to chill the passions, suggesting that the flag planting wasn't really staking a territorial claim. He often notes that U.S. astronauts left flags on the moon without claiming it.

But global warming hasn't made the moon's riches easier to plunder.

Modern man's burning of fossil fuels may be melting the Arctic icecap, making it technically and economically feasible - especially in an era of red-hot energy prices - to pry open the globe's last great untapped reservoirs of oil and gas.

That prospect has set off a scramble among countries with Arctic coastlines to try to bolster their claims under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

The "rapid melting of the polar icecaps," says a European Union report, will allow the "accessibility of the enormous hydrocarbon resources in the Arctic region," and is "changing the geo-strategic dynamics of the region."

No surprise, then, that Russia is conducting naval exercises in the Arctic. Canada had soldiers stamping about in the North this spring, and some analysts fear power projection, not talks at the UN, will decide who controls the Arctic.

Under the Convention on the Law of the Sea, countries can extend their zones beyond 200 nautical miles (about 370 kilometres) from their coasts if they can prove the outer edge of the continental shelf extends beyond that distance. Hence, the contentious Russian claim to the Lomonosov Ridge.

The prize may be huge. One study estimates 400 billion barrels of oil lie beneath the Arctic seabed, beyond the existing 200-nautical-mile economic zones where countries can regulate and control drilling. That's a little less than the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia and Iran combined.

Russia's still-to-be-formalized claim to the 2,000-kilometre-long Lomonosov Ridge, which rises more than 3,000 metres off the Arctic Ocean floor and extends from Russia all the way to North America, could be just the beginning of a new squabble.

Canada and Denmark have disputed Russia's claim. All three countries may wind up bolstering each other's claim as they attempt to divvy up the Arctic with the pole as the midpoint.

Even if Artur Chilingarov, the 2007 Russian expedition leader, was indulging in a bit of swashbuckling bravado when he claimed "the Arctic is Russian," the scramble is on to find geological evidence to push territorial claims into the centre of the Arctic Ocean.

Suggestions for politicians to cease firing salvos of accusatory, claim-staking rhetoric across the pole can be heard in Canada as well.

"Nationalist arguments that feature alarmism and more than a little paranoia only conceal the facts about Canada and the Arctic," Whitney Lackenbauer, a history professor, said in a paper on Arctic sovereignty released yesterday by the Canadian International Council.

While the five circumpolar countries say they can divvy up and run the Arctic among themselves once their claims are sorted out, others warn of dire environmental consequences.

As the ice recedes, new rules are needed to prevent "a rush to exploit all the available resources of the Arctic - another Klondike - and avoiding the destabilizing effects of massive infrastructure developments," said Jacqueline McGlade, executive director of the European Environment Agency.

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Northwest Passage

Canada is boosting its presence in the Far North to solidify its claim to the passage

Lomonosov Ridge

Russia claims the ridge is an undersea extension of its land mass.

Shrinking rink

Median minimum extent of sea ice cover over the years

KEY DISPUTES

1. Canada and the United States both claim a valuable pie-shaped slice of the Beaufort Sea. Ottawa draws its boundary straight north out to sea along the 141st meridian, while Washington prefers a line equidistant from the coasts. At stake is an offshore undersea basin expected to hold a motherlode of oil and gas.

2. Norway and Russia have a similar dispute over how to draw their maritime boundary. Moscow echoes Canada's self-serving preference for "due north" along a meridian, while Norway claims a big chunk jutting into the Barents Sea based on its ownership of tiny, remote Bear Island. Not surprisingly, one of the world's richest and yet-to-be exploited gas fields lies beneath its shallow waters.

3. Canada sees value in its claim to the Northwest Passage - the winding route between its Arctic islands leading from the Atlantic to the Beaufort and thus providing a northern shortcut linking Europe and Asia. However, Washington argues (and it seems anyone else in the world that has voiced an opinion) that the Northwest Passage is an internationalstrait - wider at its narrowest than the 12-nautical-mile extent of territorial waters. And therefore no different fromother vital international sealanes such as the Straits of Hormuz or Gibraltar.

4. Tiny, barren andunpopulated, Hans Island, in the middle of Nares Strait separating Canada's Ellesmere Island from Denmark's Greenland, is also disputed. Both countries lay claim to the 1.3-square-kilometre island, which could become a test case for resolving the jumble of overlapping claims in the Arctic.

5. Even the maritime boundary line separating Alaska from Russia and running from the Bering Sea north to the Arctic Ocean, supposedly fixed in a 1990 pact between the former Soviet Union and the United States, may be coming unravelled. The Russian Duma has never ratified the pact and while Russia was supposed to inherit all of the international treaties agreed to by theSoviet Union, some Russianparliamentarians wantthe deal reopened.

PAUL KORING, TONIA COWAN/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Source maps prepared by Hugo Ahlenius,

UNEP/GRID-Arendal, http://www.unep.org

SOURCES: United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP);F. Fetterer and K. Knowles; National Snow and Ice Data Center; United States Geological Survey; Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme; Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna; World Conservation Monitoring Centre; United States Energy Information Administration; International Energy Agency; Barents Euro-Arctic Council; Comité professionnel du pétrole, Paris; Institut français du pétrole; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; The World Bank; Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, division of Spill Prevention and Response; United States Coast Guard; ESRI Data & Maps; shadedrelief.com; World Data Center for Marine Geology & Geophysics; University of Durham.

Energy giants forging ahead

Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, ordered two huge, semi-submersible, offshore drilling platforms this month. These are massive units tough enough to drill in the iceberg-strewn Barents Sea, where one of the world's largest untapped gas fields lies deep beneath frigid waters.

While environmentalists fret and scientists frantically revise ever-shortening predictions of when global warming will melt the Arctic's ice, oil and gas giants are spending billions to drill deeper and farther offshore.

Most of the drilling - including Russia's huge new Shtokman field in the Barents Sea - is on the continental shelf, but even richer fields may lie far offshore in the High Arctic.

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates a quarter of the world's undiscovered oil and gas lies in the Arctic. Many of the potentially richest basins are yet to be drilled or explored. The Amundsen and Makarov basins, lying on either side of the long, underwater Lomonosov Ridge, claimed by Russia, may hold rich reserves, said Viktor Posyolov, deputy director of the Russian Institute of Ocean Geology in St. Petersburg. He says bottom-sampling work conducted by Russian, Canadian and Danish scientists may be needed to sort out the geology and thus the sovereignty of the Arctic. But the scientists are strapped for money, he said, and would welcome some circumpolar co-operation.

The energy giants, meanwhile, are forging ahead. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin this week visited the Sevmash shipyard - still closed to non-Russians - where a massive oil rig designed to operate in pack ice at -50 degrees is being built. Paul Koring