If the Arctic claim came as a surprise to the scientists who had done the work, they were not allowed to say so. At a so-called technical briefing on December 9th, all of the tricky questions—how much more data is needed? Isn’t the North Pole clearly in waters that will eventually be claimed by Denmark?—received roughly the same answer from Hugh Adsett, the deputy legal adviser for the foreign-affairs department. He used a variation on Mr Baird’s theme that Canada wanted to put in the biggest and boldest claim possible for what is the country’s last frontier.

Jacob Verhoef, the lead scientist for the mapping, was allowed to talk about the research that had already been done. There was a lot of it. To map the continental shelf off Canada’s east and Arctic coasts, they used boats, icebreakers, airplanes and autonomous underwater vehicles to gather data. Joint survey missions were conducted with both the Americans and the Danes (whose claim to the Arctic rests on Danish control of Greenland). The oil and gas industry was also tapped for information.

For the Atlantic alone, Canada submitted 732 co-ordinates for latitude and longitude to delineate a 1.2m sq km area where the continental shelf extends beyond the 200-nautical-mile limit that all countries can claim as their own. Mr Verhoef says scientists have already collected 15,000km of seismic data, 38,000km of bathymetric data and 58,000km of remote sensing data in the Arctic.