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

Canada ratified the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea in 2003. With that ratification came an obligation to submit data and information to the United Nations pertaining to the limits of the country’s extended continental shelf; the portion of the juridical continental shelf that extends beyond 200 nautical miles. A team of scientists spent 13 years compiling and acquiring data to provide the scientific evidence to support delineation of Canada’s outermost maritime limits. The submission has the potential to provide Canada with 2.4 million km2 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, sedimentation on 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. 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 so doing, the paper demonstrates the immensity of new knowledge gained of Canada’s offshore lands.