Canada’s maritime frontier: the science legacy of Canada’s extended continental shelf mapping for UNCLOS

• Published in: Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences
• Main Authors: Mosher, David C., Dickson, Mary-Lynn, Shimeld, John, Jackson, H. Ruth, Oakey, Gordon N., Boggild, Kai, Campbell, D. Calvin, Travaglini, Paola, Rainey, Walta-Anne, Murphy, Alain, Dehler, Sonya, Ells, John
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Canadian Science Publishing 2023
• Subjects: Arctic; Canada; Law of the Sea
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1139/cjes-2022-0069; https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/full-xml/10.1139/cjes-2022-0069; https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1139/cjes-2022-0069

Canada ratified the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) in 2003. With that ratification is an obligation to submit data and information to the U.N. pertaining to the limits of the country’s extended continental shelf (ECS); the portion of the juridical continental shelf that extends beyond 200 nautical miles. A team of Canadian scientists, managers, and legal experts that included representation from three Federal Departments (Natural Resources Canada, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and Global Affairs Canada) with additional support from other departments, spent 13 years compiling and acquiring data to provide the scientific evidence to support delineation of Canada’s seaward most maritime limit. The submission has the potential to provide Canada with 2.4 million km 2 of additional submarine landmass in the Atlantic and the Arctic oceans over which Canada exercises sovereign rights for the purpose of exploring and exploiting its natural resources. Specific information such as the tectonic framework of the continental margin, the geomorphology of the margin and in particular the continental slope, the geologic nature of adjoined ridges, rises, and plateaux, and sediment thickness within adjacent basins are examples of fundamental pieces of geoscientific information needed to substantiate Canada’s outermost maritime limits. This paper highlights a number of segments of Canada’s continental margins to showcase this scientific evidence and how it is applied in the UNCLOS context. In doing so, the paper demonstrates the geologic complexity of Canada’s margins as illustrated in scientific publications that have resulted from these new data collections, while at the same time presenting new scientific evidence and interpretations. This collection of data and information provides a wealth of new knowledge in Canada’s offshore regions. The massive data compilation in the Atlantic led to conception of continental margins, in a source-to-sink scenario, as having an equilibrium base level or graded form, ...