à ??Clearly, the High North is a region that is of strategic interest to the Alliance."
On September 16 the Voice of Russia featured an article on Antarctica which reported that "British geologists have discovered a wide array of oil and gas fields in the Falkland Islands....Edinburgh-based British Geological Survey Agency...experts insisted that as much as 60 billion barrels may be recoverable on the shelf. If these estimates prove right that may well rival the world's oil-rich nations, not least Libya and Nigeria.
"The late 1970s saw breaking news about a spate of lucrative oil and gas fields in the Falkland Islands - deposits that experts insisted were 13 times as much as those in the North Sea at the time.
"Many believe that the 1982 war between Britain and Argentina with almost 1,000 servicemen killed in the hostilities was all about oil and gas fields in the South Atlantic."
On May 11 of this year Britain submitted a claim to the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf for one million square kilometers in the South Atlantic reaching into the Antarctic Ocean.
As early as October 23, 2007 The Scotsman reported that "the value of the oil under the sea in the region is understood to be immense. Seismic tests suggest there could be about 60 billion barrels of oil under the ocean floor."
Britain is two hemispheres, the west and south, away from the Falklands/Malvinas Islands, which lie off the southeastern coast of Argentina.
The Russia source quoted earlier warned:
"Given London's unwillingness to try to arrive at a political accommodation with Buenos Aires, a UN special commission will surely have tougher times ahead as far as its final decision on the continental shelf goes. And it is only to be hoped that Britain will be wise enough not to turn the Falkland Islands into another regional hot spot."
In April of last year the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, through some combination of select compliance and procedural negligence if not complicity, granted Australia - Britain's, the U.S.'s and increasingly NATO's main outpost in the South Pacific - 2.5 million more square kilometers in the Antarctic Ocean so that the nation's territory, in the words of Resources Minister Martin Ferguson as quoted by Agence France-Presse on April 21, 2008, "expanded by an area five times the size of France," which could "potentially provide a 'bonanza' in underwater oil and gas reserves."
The expansion of Australia's seabed borders included the Kerguelen Plateau around the Heard and McDonald Islands, which extend southwards into Antarctica. As such Australia became the first nation to be granted exclusive property rights in the ocean.
In the Caspian Sea Basin and its neighborhood, which takes in the Afghanistan-Pakistan war theater and the turbulent and explosive Caucasus, Azerbaijan last week marked the fifteenth anniversary of what was called the Contract of the Century in 1994, engineered by the United States and Britain to open up the Caspian region to Western energy companies.
In the interim several oil and natural gas transit projects - the Bakuà ??Tbilisià ??Ceyhan oil and the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum and Nabucco natural gas pipelines - have been launched.
The intent of all of them is to prevent Iran from exporting hydrocarbons to Europe and to expel Russia entirely from its previous contracts to provide Europe with natural gas and Caspian oil. Russia currently supplies the European Union with 30 percent of its gas, but the West - the U.S. and its EU allies - is well on its way to replacing Russian oil and gas with supplies from Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan via Azerbaijan and from Iraq and North Africa through Turkey where all of the three pipelines mentioned above end.
Plans for what has accurately been called a Peace Pipeline from Iran through Pakistan and to India and China were heavy-handedly quashed by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her successor.
Caspian energy supplies are only to flow west to Europe and east to Asia by routes under Western control if the U.S. and its partners have their way.
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