The melting of the Arctic may not be on the mind of anyone in Britain today, with snow and ice, swept in from the northeast, still gripping the country. But this year will bring an acceleration of the race for the "High North" — the new scramble for territorial rights over the Arctic, which has been dubbed the new Cold War.

Last week, at a Nato conference in Iceland, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, Secretary-General of the alliance, warned that its members might need to keep a military presence in the Arctic because of growing tensions. Russia, with a third of its territory north of the Arctic Circle, has been the noisiest in its claims.

Last month its Defence Ministry prepared a new national directive, asserting, in strikingly confrontational terms, claims to large sections of the territory. In September, Anatoly Serdyukov, the Defence Minister, and more than a dozen senior politicians, flew out to Nagurskoye military station, a northern outpost, to begin preparing this new strategy document.

Britain, Canada, the US, China, Norway, Denmark and the European Union as a whole are all preparing to make different claims. Canada doubled its funding last year for mapping the seabed, adding that it would open an army training post at Resolute Bay, and a deep water port. In a little noticed act in the final weeks of his presidency, George W. Bush issued the US's strategy for the region. ,

Why now? Two summers in which the Arctic ice has melted much further than expected have suggested that the North West Passage, a hugely valuable sea route, might open up through the once-frozen sea. Some scientists think that the Arctic waters could be ice-free in summer within four years, decades earlier than models of global warming had previously suggested.

The retreat of the ice cap also offers the chance of extracting the huge oil and gas reserves believed to lie in half a dozen fields around the North Pole. The soaring cost of those resources — and the inevitability that world demand will keep on rising, even if the market price has fallen back for the moment — has triggered the fight for exploration rights.

Russia, where the claim to the Arctic arouses obsessive fervour among some members of parliament, is laying the ground for the contest with military showiness, comic to those at some distance, but menacing to immediate neighbours.

In August 2007, a submarine planted a Russian flag on the seabed under the Pole, more than 4,000 metres deep, on a stretch of seabed that Russia claims as its own. The stunt was regarded by many governments as ridiculous, an irrelevant military gesture that was no substitute for a legal claim, but in a country where the rule of law is less solid than the military, some politicians appear to have regarded it as a useful first step.

Less amusing, in the eyes of the other countries bordering the Arctic, was Russia's manoeuvre last summer, sending nuclear-powered ice-breakers into the waters, and stirring up fears that it planned simply to press ahead with resource exploration, outside any treaty. Canada and Norway have also reported the great increase in activity by the Russian Air Force over the Pole.

Some look towards the alliance as a forum to settle the disputes. But that may simply crystallise the clash between Nato and Russia over the region.

For now, the main battle is legal, fought through the 1982 United Nations Law of the Sea Convention. Under that pact, no country owns the North Pole or the Arctic Ocean, but neighbouring countries can claim rights to exploit natural resources in an "exclusive economic zone", defined as 200 nautical miles from land. However, they can claim further rights based on the location of the underwater continental shelf, if these are accepted by the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS), a panel of UN scientists at the United Nations.

There is still enormous room for dispute. In places, the shelf is as abrupt a ledge between shallow and deep ocean as the name implies, but in others it is gradual. Only parts of the Arctic seabed are already well mapped. So the race is on for each country to map the seabed to strengthen its claim.

Times Recommends

• James Kilgore's 27 years on the run
• Palin caught with crib notes scrawled on hand
• Hugo Chávez takes to the airwaves – 24/7