The North Pole currently lies beyond the limits of any country's territory, and it is part of the "common heritage of mankind" that is supervised by a United Nations commission. That's been the case since 1994, when the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea was entered into force.

Notably, the U.S. has not yet acquiesced to that agreement, although 154 countries and the European Community have signed and ratified the treaty.

The five countries with polar territories-Russia, the U.S., Canada, Denmark and Norway-have solid claims to the 200-mile economic zones extending from their coasts. Where the issue gets mushy concerns the push of these claims onto continental shelves. According to the U.N. convention, a country can widen its reach by showing that Arctic underwater ridges are part of its continental shelf, and therefore fall under its national jurisdiction.

Russian scientists recently returned from a research expedition with the news that the underwater Lomonosov Ridge links their country's Siberian shelf directly to the North Pole. That's the rationale behind the controversial flag planting at the pole by Russian submarines in early August.

Russia's new claim would add 1.2 million square kilometers to its jurisdiction.

This is not Russia's first attempt to snap up chunks of the polar regions. In 2001, the country applied to the U.N. Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf to push Russia's territorial limits over large swaths of the Arctic, based partly on the relationship of the Lomonosov ridge to the Eurasian continent. The U.N. recommended further study of the country's claims in the Central Arctic Ocean. Russia plans to submit a revised claim at the next commission meeting in 2009.

Denmark and Canada have also expressed claims to the Lomonosov Ridge, which is geologically a slice of continental crust that stretches from Greenland to Siberia. These countries say that the ridge actually belongs to the Greenland-Canada continental shelf, and have dispatched their own scientists to find evidence to bolster those assertions.

One obvious motivation for countries to expand their boundaries is to gain control of more natural resources. The oil and gas potential of the area in question is not well understood, however. Only a few relatively small areas of the Arctic have been moderately explored, and the Russian Arctic is among the least explored areas in the world, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The survey's assessment of world petroleum resources in 2000 only included a few Arctic basins.

Since 2004, the agency has been conducting a resource assessment of the circum-Arctic region, but work on the Russian Arctic is in its early stages and no figure is yet available.

Irregardless of the size of the potential resources, the U.S. doesn't have firm standing in the North Pole debate. The U.S. Senate has not ratified the Law of the Sea treaty, so the country doesn't have a seat on the U.N. commission that rules on claims in international waters.

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