Russia just claimed 460,000 square miles of the North Pole

Russia might be getting even bigger. On Tuesday, officials submitted a formal claim to the United Nations, asking for permission to seize a 460,000-square-mile chunk of Arctic seabed that reaches as far north as the North Pole, The Telegraph reports. The expansion has been on Russia's mind for awhile: The land was sought last October by the Russian Minister of the Environment and Natural Resources, but the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea dictates that continental shelf claims are only allowed up to 200 miles from a nation's coastline, or as far as their land naturally extends underseas. For Russia, that would mean proving that the Lomonosov Ridge and the Mendeleev Ridge are natural extensions of the Russian continental shelf, something they've not done since 2001, when they first submitted their claim to the land.

But what's in the Arctic that Russia could possibly want so bad? Oil and natural gas reserves, of course — an estimated five billion tons worth.

In December 2014, Denmark made a similar grab for land off of the Lomonosov Ridge, which extends off of their territory of Greenland. Norway, Canada, and the United States may also make similar claims.

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