LONDON — Among the headlines I never expected to see, the top three were "Pope marries," "President Bush admits error" and "Canada uses military might," but there it was, staring up at me from a British newspaper: "Canada uses military might in Arctic scramble."

Read a little further into the story and the "military might" turns out to be some armed icebreakers and two small military bases in the high Arctic, neither of which will be operational for some time to come, but all the same. . . .

At the beginning of August, mini-submarines planted a Russian flag on the Arctic seabed at the North Pole, symbolically claiming the Lomonosov Ridge, an underwater mountain range, as part of the country's continental shelf.