OREANDA-NEWS. The Ministry of Defense of Russia has obtained new exhaustive evidence of Russia’s ownership of the Arctic Ocean shelf. It was reported by the Deputy Prime Minister Yury Borisov at a meeting of the Marine Board under the Government held in Saint Petersburg.

The politician noted that the military conducted additional bathymetric and gravimetric studies, as well as acoustic profiling. According to Borisov, these data will be sufficient to exhaustively substantiate the Russian application at a meeting of the UN commission which will be held in February 2020.

The Deputy Prime Minister recalled that in August 2015, Russia submitted to the UN commission an application for establishing the border of the continental shelf in the Arctic Ocean. Since then 11 meetings have been held. “At these meetings, additional argumentation was required to justify the continental nature of several structural elements of the Arctic basin, including geological and geophysical evidence of the geological history of the formation of the Lomonosov Ridge. At the 50th session in July 2019, the sub-commission did not agree with the arguments of our delegation,” Borisov said.

Russia claimed for a hydrocarbon-rich shelf area, including the Lomonosov Ridge and the Mendeleyev Ridge, in 2001, but its application was rejected because of lack of geological information. According to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, to expand the shelf, it is necessary to prove the continental nature of the adjacent geological structures on the ocean floor. New expeditions to the North Pole, geological and geophysical studies of the Mendeleyev Ridge and Lomonosov Ridge, and bathymetric surveys took more than 10 years.

According to experts, hydrocarbon reserves in the area may be about 4.9 billion tons.