The Barents Sea island of Nymark wants to break away from the king of Norway and be a republic. Or so says Alex Hartley.
The English artist is the self-proclaimed discoverer and ruler of Nymark, an uninhabited island the size of a soccer field. Nymark emerged in recent years as a glacier warmed and retreated from the sea.
"About two weeks ago I wrote to the Norwegian prime minister, the Norwegian Foreign Office and the governor of Svalbard saying I wanted to secede," Hartley, 42, told Reuters by telephone from London.
"I have also written to the United Nations for official recognition as an independent nation."
He said he discovered the island in 2004 while on a trip around the Svalbard archipelago and named it Nymark — "New Ground" in Norwegian.
A 1920 treaty signed by the major world powers of that era gave sovereignty of the Arctic islands to Norway.
But while the treaty says Norway rules the main islands around Spitsbergen "together with all islands great or small and rock," Hartley says it does not apply to Nymark as it had not been discovered then.
"I was the first person to land on the island. I built a cairn and left a claim in a tin can," he said.
And since then he has held architecture and flag design competitions for his new fiefdom.
Bah, humbug
The Norwegian government is fighting back and dismisses the Englishman's claim, saying the 1920 treaty covers the entire archipelago area, including Nymark.
The Norwegian Polar Institute also says it has known about the island through satellite photographs since 1998.
"The ice cap withdrew and uncovered it," the institute's information officer Gunn Sissel Jaklin said. "Anyway, we don't consider it big enough to be an island."
The islands of Svalbard have a long history of being claimed and counter-claimed by adventurers, sailors and explorers dating back to the Vikings. Jaklin said there are already 16,614 place names on the islands, reflecting some previous visitors.
Hartley said he would not give up on the island. He wants to highlight the effects of global warming, which he says caused the glacier to retreat by about a mile over the past decade to unveil Nymark.