As Arctic warms, generals agree to closer ties at historic meet

By David Ljunggren; Editing by Eric Walsh
13 Apr 2012

OTTAWA (Reuters) – Defense chiefs from eight Arctic nations agreed on Friday to cooperate more closely to deal with disasters and search and rescue operations in the remote resource-rich region, Canada’s top soldier said. As the Arctic warms up, major nations are jostling for influence in a frozen part of the world believed to contain vast reserves of oil, gas, gold, diamonds, zinc and iron. Canada’s chief of the defense staff told Reuters that the inaugural meeting of top Arctic military officials had vowed to work together in a region where there is little infrastructure and coping with a disaster could be very difficult. “Certainly what we saw was a great sense of a spirit of cooperation amongst everyone,” General Walter Natynczyk said after the conference at a military base at Goose Bay in the Canadian Atlantic province of Newfoundland and Labrador. As well as Canada, the United States, and Russia – which account for the vast majority of the Arctic – Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden also attended. Natynczyk said the defense chiefs had agreed to meet once a year from now on. “The climate … is changing and therefore areas that heretofore have been inaccessible really are now open for much longer (in) the year,” Natynczyk said in a phone interview. The eight nations will look for ways to “enable such cooperation operations … (as) search and rescue, or in response to a natural disaster, a man-made crisis like a ship going up on the rocks and those kinds of scenarios,” he said. The Arctic is warming up much faster than the rest of the world, which in theory could open up relatively short cross-Polar shipping routes. […]

Arctic generals agree closer ties at historic meet