Boundaries of Place and Time at the Edge of the Polar Oceans

Abstract

There is a problem fermenting in the frigid waters of the Beaufort Sea, a portion of the Arctic Ocean north of Canada and the United States. The trouble has its roots in an 1825 treaty signed between Great Britain and Russia, which divided their North American territories into what are now Alaska and Yukon. In that treaty, the two empires drew a north–south boundary along the ‘Meridian Line of the 141st degree’ that ‘in its prolongation as far as the Frozen Ocean, shall form the limit between the Russian and British Possessions’.1 Nearly 200 years later the inheritors of this agreement, the United States and Canada, are interpreting the phrase ‘as far as the Frozen Ocean’ in contrasting ways. Canada understands this sentence to mean that the boundary between the two nations extends past the shoreline and into the Beaufort Sea, while the United States argues that the border ends at the coastline where the ‘Frozen Ocean’ begins.