Greenland.
Ask the average joe about the arctic nation and you will likely get a shrug or a squinting of the eye denoting your subject knows little about it.
In the odd case, you might get some Menza-type guy or gal who tells you frozen vast wasteland in the North Atlantic, that has very little impact on the world as a whole.
And they would be right. That is until now.
Greenland has recently approved bids for drilling for oil near Baffin Bay at the mouth of Lancaster Sound.
And while I'n not positive to where that is, I do know that it is treacherously close to an area near Greenland's border with Canada where that nation hopes to set up a maritime conservation area.
The idea of putting up deep ocean oil wells in the area is precarious at best. The area that the wells would be put in is known as Iceberg Alley - so I'm told because of the massive chunks of ice that break off of Greenland and float down to the North Atlantic.
It's likely that it was one of these doozies took down the Titanic. Imagine what it could do to an oil well that doesn't move.
Some environmentalists are worried that if their is an oil spill in the region, which seems to be an inevitability, the oil would be caught under ice which could have a detrimental ecological impact for weeks, months, even years to come.
And that's the scary part.
No one is exactly sure how an oil spill would affect the area.
For Canada's part, they say they'll ensure Greenland follows proper safety procedures. Great. A country who can't even keep it's own property from being drilled within 72 hours of the Gulf of Mexico disaster makes me feel terrific about the chances of an oil spill happening in the region.
A colleague of mine said, "You know this oil spill is probably the best thing to happen to Offshore drilling - there's no way Canada will allow that to happen anymore."
You couldn't have been more wrong.
DG
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