11:14
August 2007. A nuclear-powered Russian icebreaker cuts its way through the Arctic Ocean. On board, a mini submarine. It's about to dive 2 and 1/2 miles to the seabed. There, the Russians will plant a titanium flag directly beneath the North Pole to symbolize Moscow's claims to the Arctic. But Russia isn't alone. The United States, Canada, Denmark, and Norway are all staking similar claims. As the polar ice melts, it's becoming much easier to gain access to the gas, oil, and minerals beneath the seabed.
The scramble is on to claim the right to exploit them. And the first ever political map of the Arctic is being drawn up to identify the disputed territories. I've been studying maps for most of my life, and this is the most intriguing attempt I've seen to map the future. This is an extraordinary map. What this map shows is all these different countries looming up onto the North Pole. Russia, USA, Canada, Greenland, Scandinavian countries.
Laying claim to different bits of the pole. All these different colors show competing political and economic interests. Mapmaking has always been bound up with politics. From attempts to map the known world in the Middle Ages, to the age of exploration and discovery, to Imperial Britain's claim to be the center of the world. And now the new Arctic map brings together geography, economics, and international law in an attempt to settle the latest territorial dispute. Mapmakers are now at the heart of a really charged struggle around political influence and access to riches. But it's not for the first time, because the history of maps is also the history of power, plunder, and possession.
Palermo Cathedral. Christmas Day in the year 1130. A Norman warrior is crowned Roger II, King of Sicily. One of the wealthiest and most influential kingdoms in Europe. Roger's kingdom was composed of a rather volatile mix of Christians, Greeks, and Muslims. And Roger wanted to stamp his authority across all of them, but not just through brute force. He commissioned a team of scholars dedicated to the mapping of the culture and territories of the entire Mediterranean region and the world beyond it.
Roger entrusted the making of the map to the foremost Muslim scholar of the day, Muhammad al-Idrisi. Over 15 years, Idrisi gathered travelers' accounts of distant lands and the latest information about trade, transport, and political power in each territory. He then began work on a series of regional maps covering the whole of the known world. The maps stretch all the way from China in the east to Spain in the west. In an accompanying text, Spain is described in great detail as a land of fine estates defended by well-fortified castles. To the north, Britain is located in the sea of darkness and described as being the shape of an ostrich head.
Its inhabitants are said to be brave, active, and enterprising, but all is in the grip of perpetual winter. The western Mediterranean is dominated by Roger's kingdom. Sicily's size is exaggerated. Idrisi calls it the pearl of the age. The maps were bound together with the text describing the regions of the world and became known as the Book of Roger. This is the book that Roger asked him to write to put in all the information that he had assembled about the inhabited world in his day. And it consists of 70, 7 0, maps, each accompanied by several pages of text telling you about the cities, how
you get from one city to the next, how long it takes you, discussions of harbors, uh a great deal about commodities, uh resources. The Book of Roger is full of vivid geographical detail. But Idrisi's maps clearly aren't the result of a scientific survey. What we see here is North Africa. This is the Mediterranean. Look at this coast. That is anything but accurate. It's just a wavy line with the cities just lined up on them. So, what he's really actually giving you is the sequence of the
harbors probably along here. So, the text is necessary for any kind of detail. Text and map are integral. Extremely clever, innovative. Simple, but brilliant. Yes. While Idrisi was working on his maps, Roger was still expanding his kingdom, gaining strategic footholds in Greece and North Africa. What do you think that Roger's trying to do with Idrisi? He's trying to get as much information out of him as possible about all of the areas of the world that Roger didn't rule. Uh so that the not only was Idrisi commissioned to draw a map, but he was commissioned to find out everything he could about trade and travel and distances between cities and fortresses, all the sorts of things that a someone wishing to conquer an area
would need to know. Roger, of course, had political designs himself on Spain. He uh he dreamed of possibly conquering Spain, possibly North Africa. So, the knowledge that Idrisi had would have been very useful to Roger. From his island kingdom in the middle of the Mediterranean, Roger was playing for high stakes in international politics. He'd realized that maps weren't just about the quest for knowledge, and he appreciated that you could now use maps to put his tiny kingdom onto a much larger world stage. Roger's map of the known world was being used to describe and celebrate his expanding empire. But maps would later become much more powerful tools of conquest.
The great leap forward came at the turn of the 15th century with the translation into Latin of a rediscovered classical work called simply the Geography. Its author was a Greek scholar called Claudius Ptolemy, also known as the father of geography. Working in the great library of Alexandria in Egypt in the 2nd century, Ptolemy built up a vast knowledge of the world. This is Bosham. Now a tiny village on the Sussex coast, it was once a bustling port on the edge of the Roman Empire called Magnus Portus. And Ptolemy managed to plot its position in his geography 2,000 years ago.
Someone has to come here. Mhm. Someone has to do lots of observations, observing the stars, observing the sun. Then it has to get back to Ptolemy. Uh and then Ptolemy has to do the geometry. He has to do the mathematics to work out what the correct latitude and longitude should be given what the traveler has reported. So, one line in this is a huge amount of work. Ptolemy's system of mapping was inspired by his knowledge of astronomy. He devised a grid of intersecting lines to map the position of the stars and then transferred this web-like grid to the globe.
Ptolemy used astronomy, geometry, and mathematics to plot the positions of 8,000 places in the known world. He's sitting in Alexandria and he's actually marking Magnus Portus' bosom here. He's thousands of miles away. spider sitting in the middle of the web pulling it all in, isn't he? It's a purely geometrical principle and that's the genius of what Ptolemy does. He puts that across the Earth. He allows us to understand where every location is in relation to every other location and it's a fantastic enduring principle which takes us right through to the modern age of map making. Ptolemy was tackling the greatest challenge of map making. Finding a way to represent the spherical shape of the Earth on a flat surface.
As you can see, a globe doesn't look very flat, does it? Yeah. And the question is whether you can actually take the surface of a sphere and flatten it out. And easy way to see that is actually to peel off part of the surface. This is probably good enough bit. Okay? So, here's here's little piece of the Earth. It's about a quarter of the whole thing. If I try and flatten this out, it doesn't want to go. It really does not want to be flattened. What that means is that if you're going to draw a map that's flat, you can't get all of the geometry of the real globe correct. There's no way to map the globe exactly onto a flat surface. But Ptolemy perfected a working compromise we still use today.
Projection. Ptolemy's idea is very straightforward. Draw a grid on a piece of paper and it doesn't have to be exactly the same shape as the grid on the sphere. We have here a diagram from his book telling you how to do it. These circles are lines of latitude. These straight lines are the lines of longitude. So, those correspond to the lines on the sphere. There's this catalog of latitude and longitude for various points and you can just look at the grid and say, "Ah, such and such a city should go here. Such and such a city should go there." And you mark all the cities in,
all the points, code bits of coastline, rivers, everything is listed. And then you kind of join up the dots and you've got your map. We're going to test Ptolemy's calculations against the pinpoint accuracy of 21st century GPS. North 50° 49.6 minutes. West 0° 51.5 Let's have a look at what Ptolemy's geography tells us. Magnus Portus has coordinates longitude 19, latitude 53. So, why is the longitude it seems so far out? And the answer is he didn't put his zero longitude where we do. So, this is coordinates from nearly 2,000 years ago and he's only a few degrees out. So, he's pretty close considering you
know, the reports he's getting from travelers will not be fantastically well observed and fantastically accurate. Um it's impressive for 2,000 years ago. It's no wonder that Ptolemy was known as the father of geography because this map making kit that he put together was one of the great achievements of the classical world and a pinnacle of Greek science. And for the next 14 centuries, it remained seriously unchallenged. Instead, it was being used throughout that period to chart the known world, to imagine it, and to even start to control it.
Once translated, Ptolemy's geography was distributed throughout Renaissance Europe and fueled curiosity about the world beyond the Mediterranean. An hour before dawn, the 3rd of August, 1492, three ships with a 90-strong crew are leaving the Spanish harbor of Palos and heading west. Leading the expedition, Christopher Columbus. A new age of exploration was just beginning. Columbus was bound for China and he was inspired by the most up-to-date map of the day, the Martellus map.
The map extends from the Canaries in the west to the east coast of China. It also shows the first sea route round the Cape of Good Hope to the Far East, newly discovered by the Portuguese. The Martellus map convinced Columbus that he could open up a faster sea route to the riches of Asia by sailing directly west. The expedition was driven by Columbus's overweening desire for fame, titles, and riches. But this was an incredibly risky venture. The sailors on board all three ships were full of doubts and fears and they referred to the voyage as this mad fantasy.
In 1989, Sir Robin Knox-Johnston single-handedly retraced Columbus's journey across the Atlantic using the same kind of instruments that Columbus had used. What was it that inspired you to follow um Columbus's voyage? Well, primarily, I wanted to see how accurately they could navigate in those days. I'd sailed those waters before. We'd never been focusing on that. So, there I am. I'm just going to do nothing but just think about Columbus, do this voyage like Columbus. I'm going to pick stuff up. When he leaves from near Cadiz and goes
down to the Canary Islands, which is also Spanish. So, that's a voyage they make quite frequently. But it's from here. This is where he takes his last food and water on board and then he sets off into the blue. It's pretty risky. Oh, certainly it's risky. But he was right in a way that, you know, if you keep going west, you would eventually reach Japan or China. Had he Well, he didn't know America was in the way. Um but the theory was right. You know, the Martellus map would say to him, "If I keep going on this latitude all the way around, I'll pop up that side of the map." Somewhere here.
Yeah. The Martellus map convinced Columbus that China was much closer than it really was. Following Ptolemy's calculations, Martellus underestimated the circumference of the Earth and it turned out to be a massive 7,000 miles wider than he thought. What we're missing totally here is the full extent of the Atlantic, the whole of the Americas and the Pacific Ocean. Quite a lot we're missing. Ptolemy didn't know anything about it. He sort of guessed it'd be 21, maybe 28 days. Ended up being 35. But, you know, in 21 days he's going to reach China. Um well, that's okay according to the distance he's calculated to be. But he passes that distance and it's still empty ocean. And the days
go on after one after another, still no land, still not sighting anything. Crew getting fed up. Hey, we don't want to die here. Here I am, 25 days at sea on my own. Haven't seen a ship now for well over a week. And I think I've got about a thousand miles to go. And at this speed, I'll make it in about 10 days, I think. Maybe 11. Cheers. He just goes on until he starts seeing birds. Wait a minute. They've got to come from land. Watch where they go at night cuz they always go home at night.
Okay, that's where land is. About 20 minutes ago, at 8:20 exactly, I sighted some land and at first I wasn't sure, but now I'm absolutely sure it is land. It's up to the northwest. I expected it to be down to the southeast if anything. Sir Robin Knox-Johnston made land after 34 days at sea. Columbus and his crew took a day longer. For Columbus, it now seemed that the riches of the East were spread out before him. He eagerly went to shore in an armed boat and was greeted by crowds of curious local people eager to see the new arrival.
Columbus named the new territory San Salvador. We now know it's an island in the Caribbean. Columbus was convinced he'd landed in China and he had no idea that his massive miscalculation would make him the most famous explorer in history. Columbus had discovered a new continent, America. But such was the power of his belief in the map that he was using that he went to his grave 14 years later still convinced that he discovered a western passage to Asia. To this day we still celebrate Columbus as the discoverer of America. But it was a place that he never believed even existed. When Columbus returned to Europe, the map of the world was redrawn.
This strange but incredibly beautiful map is the first ever that records the land discovered by Columbus on his first voyage. You can see here the Bahamas and over here San Salvador. It was made by Juan de la Cosa who went with Columbus on his first voyage and all his subsequent expeditions to the New World. It was probably made to show to the Spanish sovereigns, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand back here in Spain to give them a sense of the extent of the New World over here to the west. And as if to emphasize the point, the New World is like this big verdant green claw in complete contrast to the rest of the map giving the Spaniards a sense of entitlement,
the enticement of the New World. As European powers vied for control of these lucrative new territories, maps became vital tools in a global struggle for dominance. In 1502, an Italian undercover agent smuggled this map out of Portugal. It shows all the new Portuguese discoveries from India to the Persian Gulf, But like all maps of this era, it marks the vast New World in the West as largely uncharted territory. In 1503, an Italian explorer published a set of pamphlets announcing his own discoveries in the New World. His name was Amerigo Vespucci. Vespucci wrote, "And so we sailed on till we reached a land which we deemed to be a continent which is distant westwardly from the Isles of Canary beyond the inhabited regions."
This was a groundbreaking statement because maps of the time suggested that the New World was somehow connected to Asia. All of these maps show that New World without a complete west coast. They are somehow joining that New World to Asia. So Vespucci's claim to have discovered a separate fourth continent was completely at odds with what everybody really believed. Vespucci's description of a fourth continent fired the imagination of a German mapmaker, Martin Waldseemüller. In 1507, he incorporated its outline into a pioneering new work.
Waldseemüller's map is absolutely vast, much bigger than this projection actually shows. When these 12 printed sheets are all stuck together, it stands 1 and 1/2 m tall and 2 and 1/2 m wide. And that was deliberate because Waldseemüller wanted this map to hang on the great aristocratic courtly walls of Europe. No European had yet seen the ocean on the far side of the New World. But here it was shown by Waldseemüller for the first time. In contrast to all the other maps showing the latest discoveries, this continent is shown completely surrounded by water. It's totally navigable. This is the first map ever that shows America as a separate fourth continent. And Waldseemüller labels it for the very
first time down here, America, in honor of Amerigo Vespucci. The only surviving copy of Waldseemüller's map of the world was bought by the US Library of Congress in 2003. It was the first document of any kind that introduces the word America to the world. The map is now known as America's birth certificate. Maps have played a crucial role in forging national identities across the world. But sometimes mapmakers purposefully bend the truth to serve the interests of powerful nations.
A fertile archipelago in the Pacific Ocean known as the Moluccas or Spice Islands is at the heart of a bitter dispute. Spain and Portugal were battling over two of the most valuable commodities in 16th century Europe, nutmeg and cloves. This was a very serious business. Cloves may not seem to be terribly priced today, but at the time in the 16th century, they were literally worth their weight in gold used for medicinal and also culinary purposes. A summit was called to try to settle the dispute between the two imperial superpowers of the age. The Portuguese initially had the upper hand. They were effectively in control of the Moluccas. But as the superpowers summit began, the Spanish king produced
his trump card. A new map of the world that claimed to be more authoritative than any other so far. This beautiful hand-drawn map had been specially made for the king by a virtuoso mapmaker called Diego Ribeiro. It features finely drawn navigational and scientific instruments as if to emphasize its authority. For the map's primary purpose was political. Ribeiro's map shows how the two superpowers had previously agreed to divide the world into two spheres of influence. Here you can see the two flags of the contending empires. There's the Portuguese flag and there's the Spanish
flag. Everything to the east belongs to the Portuguese and everything to the west of this line belongs to the Spanish. The Spice Islands had always been placed in the Portuguese sphere of influence on the far eastern side of the world. But on Ribeiro's new map, they've moved. Here they are, the Moluccas Islands all picked out here. So what he's done is he's actually put them in the Spanish half of the western hemisphere. And you can tell because here is the Spanish flag and clearly laying claim to the all these islands here, the Moluccas. So convincing was Ribeiro's map that the Portuguese reluctantly accepted that the Moluccas were in Spanish territory.
Ribeiro had pulled off a brilliant con trick. His map had cooked the books. And this is what I find so fascinating about world maps. We look at them and think that we're seeing an accurate standardized representation of the Earth. But the more we dig down beneath the layers of the map, we start to see selection going on, we start to see manipulation and even deception. Beautiful scientific objects they may be, but it is that ability of the map to fuse all those different elements, high politics, science, art, commerce, that makes them so irresistible to rulers throughout history. In the early 16th century, navigating at
sea was a perilous business. Ships crossing the Atlantic could find themselves hundreds of miles off course with deadly consequences. Starvation, dehydration, shipwreck. And maps were the problem. Due to the curvature of the Earth, ships trying to follow a straight line on a map ended up veering dangerously off course. But in the mid-16th century, there was a mapmaking revolution. It would solve this navigational problem and inspire the creation of the most influential map in history. It still defines our vision of the world in the 21st century.
The man behind this revolutionary projection is proudly celebrated in his hometown of Rupelmonde in Belgium. He's known as the prince of modern geographers, but Mercator had a humble start in life. So, here I come at the house where Mercator was born on the 5th of March 1512 6:00 in the morning. It was a hospital for poor people. That was the original use. It was a hospital. It was a hospital and his uncle was here a priest in the hospital. Taught him here mathematics and Latin. And Mercator's uncle made it possible for this young boy, poor boy, brilliant boy, to go to university and become what he has become.
The mapmaker of the navigation. As a boy, Mercator often came here to the quayside on the river Scheldt. So, this is the harbor where the young Mercator 5, 6 years old got in touch with the world, the sea, the sailing. Of course, Columbus discovered America and suddenly he must have talked about it with the sailors talking about navigation and he had all that in mind. And where does the river take us? Well, the river take us from here to Antwerp, then to the sea and then to the whole world. After studying mathematics, geography and astronomy Mercator began making globes for European royalty and other wealthy patrons. To do this, he outlined the countries of the world onto a series of long segments of paper called gores.
When joined together, they would fit perfectly around a globe. This globe is made in 1541 by Mercator. It's beautiful. It's absolutely exquisite. So, how would you make a globe like this? When you make a globe like this, you had to put on plaster. And then you had to put on it the gores who were engraved in on copper. To make a gore has to be very accurate. But what's what's amazing is extreme Come to you so another sheet for the whole world. I can't see the joins here on the gores. It's done with incredible skill. Building on his work as a globe maker, in 1569 Mercator devised a new method of projection onto a flat surface to help navigators at sea.
Mercator began by straightening the lines of longitude or meridians. He then increased the spaces between the lines of latitude moving away from the equator. Here it is the famous world map from Mercator. He made this map in 1569. A new map for sailors in his time. For the first time, navigators would be able to plot a straight line between two points on a map and safely reach their destination. To achieve this, Mercator had struck a cartographic compromise. To ensure navigational accuracy, his projection increasingly distorts the size of countries the further they are from the equator.
They're actually mapped to infinity. I mean, they're vast. And it's the same down here. On the pole, yeah. So, the South Pole goes like this. Goes like that. So, it's a way of stretching the world. But as a result, you do get this massive distortion. Mercator distorts the globe in other ways, too. By deliberately placing the equator south of the center he gives Europe a dominant position in the world. These distortions have been retained as the map projection has been updated over the centuries.
There's no doubt as far as I'm concerned that the Mercator world map is the most important one ever made. It defines the history of cartography for the next four centuries and it is used everywhere in school atlases. The British Empire even adopts it to get a sense of its imperial dominion. This is the map which for us in the west defines the world as we understand it still to this day. Designed for navigation, Mercator's projection made maps more useful as aids to exploration. And no one understood this better than the merchants of the Dutch East India Company established in 1602.
They used the latest maps to lead them to the treasures of the East and the company quickly became a mighty global force. Well, at the beginning of the 17th century, maps stop being or become less gorgeous hand-painted objects to be exchanged, to be presented as gifts by ambassadors. And they become part of the paraphernalia and business of travel. So, they are part of a commercial toolbox for exploring the globe with a view to making profit. The vast corporate empire of the Dutch East India Company or VOC as it was known stretched from Africa to Japan.
It was run from its headquarters here in Amsterdam. This was the hub of a global information network where the company's own cartographers drew up their own maps. These maps were closely guarded commercial secrets. The ships of the Dutch East India Company had a combination of small-scale maps and large-scale maps on board. The small-scale sail maps were crossing the big oceans, the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. This one was used for crossing the Atlantic although there's only a little piece left. When they had crossed the ocean, they needed larger-scale maps. Of course, the inland is hardly visible because that was of no use, but
everything on the shore or in front of the shore was very clear and very accurate. Because this is really a map about commerce. It's about marking the coastline and working out where you can land and where you can trade your goods. When you were nearing your goal, it was very essential that you have had a very accurate map. In fact, it was a whole circulation of communication that took place. So, the pilots, they took their charts again back to Amsterdam and they said, "This is wrong. This is better. I made that one better." The chief chartmaker, he improved the maps and sent the ships with new improved maps. As the Dutch mapped the world with increasing accuracy, they were also
staking their claim on new territory. They're using the equivalent of the arrived at by sea, but you know where other people are, other Westerners in relation to yourself. In 1633, the VOC hired Willem Blaeu as its chief mapmaker. Blaeu had his own successful mapmaking business and his new job gave him access to highly classified information. Rather odd that a man like Willem Janszoon Blaeu, that he was both had his own business. He made atlases and atlas
maps. And next to that, he was the chief cartographer of the Dutch East India Company. And whereas these maps were secret because that was commercial capital, these maps were in the end little puzzle pieces that fitted into the big puzzle of the world map that improved steadily on and on. So, Blaeu is using this kind of raw material to then put together an updated version of the world map. Yes. Blaeu's atlas was a luxury object, beautifully bound and engraved, full of color and intricate typography. Blaeu used the latest data gathered by the Dutch East India Company to update the map of the world using Mercator's projection.
This was the first time that a Mercator projection was included in a world atlas. In this way, he popularized a projection that wasn't popular at all. It was a projection that was made for the seafaring people, for the pilots. And now he included the map on which he apparently was so proud in his atlas. In the 1630s, Blaeu's Atlas was translated into many languages and became a huge success. And the Dutch East India Company was now eclipsing Portugal and Spain in global trade. Big innovation from the middle of the 17th century for the Dutch is that they stopped carrying in gold and silver simply to buy and sell in the Indies and carry the trade back. They now trade across the Indies with other nations, with other Dutch
parts of the East India Company. Tra- They transact goods for other goods. They use copper. They use silk for spices. There's a whole burgeoning, really commercial marketplace, which is remote from Holland. They are an autonomous bazaar in the East Indies, and the maps have enabled that. By the end of the 18th century, the VOC had sent over a million people to work in the Asian trade. They dispatched nearly 5,000 ships and netted millions of tons of goods and commodities. The VOC brought huge prosperity to Holland and kick-started a sophisticated international market. But in the 19th century, the failure to standardize maps began to hold back the development of an efficient global economy.
Navigation relied on comparing the time at your current location with the time on a fixed line of longitude called a prime meridian. Britain's prime meridian ran through Greenwich, where the time was marked once a day by the time ball at Flamsteed House. Passing Flamsteed House as the time ball fell here, ships leaving the London docks could now quite accurately set their clocks to 1:00 p.m. Greenwich meantime. But that, of course, was just the British ships. Trading nations all
the way from France right through to Japan were still using their own measurements of time according to their own prime meridians. It was absolute chaos. So, could the world's maps be standardized around a single line? In 1884, representatives of 25 countries came together to decide where the world's prime meridian should be. The meridian lines that had ranged across the world's maps since Ptolemy were now symbols of imperial prestige. Proceedings were dominated by Britain and France, who were by now the preeminent imperial powers of the age, with each lobbying for the supremacy of their own prime meridian.
The French delegates regarded themselves as part of a long and extremely distinguished tradition of scientific mapmaking. They were going to fight their corner really hard. They had no intention of giving up the prime meridian here in Paris to the British. But Britain's claim found support from the United States delegate, Commander William Sampson. Commander Sampson argued that the meridian should be selected which is now in most general use. More than 70% of all the shipping of the world uses the Greenwich meridian. Britain now had the advantage. When it came to the vote, only San Domingo opposed the British claim.
The French abstained. Britain was absolutely triumphant. And this 1886 British Empire map shows Britain right at the center of the world with the Greenwich meridian running right down the middle. And across the map in red, British imperial dominions. And just to make the point very clear about what's happening here, Britannia is shown lounging on a globe. The French delegation returned home to Paris with their tails between their legs, but they still refused to concede defeat. This French world map produced eight years after the meridian conference stubbornly sticks to Paris as the prime meridian and by implication France as the center of the world. It would be another quarter of a century before the
French mapmakers adopted Greenwich as their prime meridian. The international battle over the prime meridian is long over. And the mapping of the whole world is almost complete. But disputes over unclaimed territory continue. In 2007, the age of discovery and plunder was given a new lease of life when a Russian submarine planted a titanium flag on the seabed directly beneath the North Pole. And the rush by other nations to claim rights over natural resources beneath the Arctic ice is now putting today's mapmakers at the heart of a new struggle for power and wealth. The International Boundaries Research Unit at Durham University is drawing up new maps of the Arctic in an effort to resolve potential territorial disputes.
This is the political map and this is the physical map. That's That's correct, yes. Why is this map so important now? The need for the physical mapping is because so little is known about what lies under the Arctic because it has been covered by ice. So, global warming is creating a much more politically charged area around claims to the North Pole here. To some extent, it the opening up of the Arctic waters means that the areas where there's potential resources is becoming much clearer. So, what are the resources involved here? It's huge. Uh I think it was something like 20 billion barrels of oil and gas in the Arctic region.
Areas likely to be rich in gas and oil have already been partially mapped. But who owns these resources? It all depends on who can establish their claim to the seabed. The Durham team have created the first political map of the Arctic to show who is currently laying claim to what. We have the land territories of Russia, which has the longest coastal frontage on the Arctic. The USA through its sovereignty over Alaska. We have Canada with the Canadian archipelago. Then we have Greenland under the sovereignty of Denmark. And finally Norway through its sovereignty over the Svalbard archipelago.
States have rights over the resources up to 200 nautical miles from their coastline. But in exceptional circumstances, it's possible for a country to extend this boundary. And that's what the Russians are trying to do. They're laying claim to a raised area of the seabed extending all the way from Siberia to the North Pole. It's called the Lomonosov Ridge. The famous flag planting incident on the North Pole seabed came as part of Russia's attempt to gather more evidence that the Lomonosov Ridge really is physically connected to the continental margin of Russian land territory, which
caused quite a hostile reaction from some of its neighbors, particularly Canada, which said that why was Russia claiming the North Pole as Russian? Legally, it has no effect at all. Um planting of planting a flag certainly these days does not say anything about title to territory. I think having a good map on the table in a negotiation is extremely important. As that ocean becomes more navigable, there's a risk of naval incidents. Who knows what kind of geopolitical games could be played in the regions. From medieval times to the age of discovery and the era of empire, mapmaking has always been bound up with conquest, imperial expansion, and conflict.
This modern map in progress depicts the fault lines of the future. It's a warning of potential conflict ahead as the Arctic ice melts. The lessons of history would suggest that where there's a world map, plunder will surely follow. But this time the mapmakers are ahead of the game because when the ice melts and the exploitation really starts, there'll be an internationally recognized chart of the region to take the heat out of the conflicts over mineral wealth which will surely take place. In the 21st century, mapmakers have become peacemakers.
