Danish geologists heading for the arctic say their expedition could support a claim the North Pole belongs to Greenland, and by extension to Denmark.

Seismic data they collect may support the claim of Denmark and Greenland, politically linked, to 60,000 square miles of extra territory extending north from Greenland into the oil and gas-rich arctic sea floor, they said.

The claim rests on whether an underwater formation extending north of Greenland called the Lomonosov Ridge qualifies as an extension of Greenland's land mass, NewScientist.com reported.

If it does, Greenland can bid to extend its undersea territory.

Such a bid would meet with opposition from Russia, which in 2007 claimed the opposite end of the ridge is an extension of Siberia.

Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, geological data are a prerequisite to winning an officially recognized claim to territory, Jens Jorgen Moller, head of the Danish expedition, said.