Word: denmarks
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...population fought for management of domestic affairs, which it was granted, but Copenhagen still handles its foreign relations and supports the island with a whopping $600 million yearly subsidy. Diplomatic relations between territory and crown are very cordial - indeed, some Greenlanders consider themselves lucky to have been colonized by Denmark and not the United States or Canada - but some also feel that the same well-intentioned Danish money that keeps the island on its feet also keeps it under Denmark's thumb. A small faction of politically minded Greenlanders has been looking for a way out for decades...
...North Pole last month, Greenland had been eyeing its own potential reserves of oil and gas surrounding the island. Shrimp processing is the biggest contributor to the territory's GDP today, but big oil could offer a much shorter path to self-reliance. In September, Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Denmark's Dong Energy joined the ranks of those who have been looking for oil off Greenland's west coast, and last month the U.S. Geological Survey released an estimate that an area off Greenland's northeast coast could yield the equivalent of 31.4 billion barrels...
What happens when they find it is another matter. Right now, Greenland and Denmark have 50-50 rights to profits from Greenland's natural resources. Securing full rights to administer the oil, gas and minerals harvested from their land and water has been a recurring theme among Greenlanders who want greater sovereignty, but talks about whether the territory will take over sole rights are currently stalled. And in August Denmark sent a crew of some 40 scientists on a technically unprecedented mission to explore whether a ridge beneath the North Pole was geologically linked to their territory...
...resources within 200 nautical miles (230 miles, 370 km) of its coast. The treaty provides for extending that limit up to 350 nautical miles if a country can prove that its continental shelf extends from the coastline beyond the current limit. That explains the rush by Russia, Denmark and Canada to try to use the murky form of the underwater Lomonosov Ridge to expand the territory they control. The ridge, a largely uncharted geological formation named for an 18th century Russian polymath born near the northern coastal city of Arkhangel'sk, runs under the Pole from north of Canada...
...event, it is hardly as if Russia were the only nation to see the Arctic as a place to burnish national pride. The Norwegians have their new gas field, and Denmark is pursuing proof of its own claims just as doggedly as the Russians - though in a more consensual, Scandinavian mode. The Danes enlisted both a Swedish and a Russian icebreaker for its expedition to the largely uncharted waters north of Greenland to document what Science Minister Helge Sander refers to as "our hopefully justified claim of a continental shelf from Greenland toward the North Pole." The Danes know that...