Remember Hans Island - that tiny, brass monkey cold, chunk of Arctic rock that both Denmark and Canada claim is rightfully theirs, and have agreed to disagree about?

According to a leading Canadian academic, who's also a geologist, actual ownership of the frozen flyspeck really doesn't matter. Hans Island's true value, he says, is that it has raised public awareness about the importance of the Arctic and the immense responsibility polar nations share in protecting its future.

Here's what Robert Gilbert, writing in The Toronto Star, had to say about the value of his recent Arctic field  trip.

As I collected geological specimens in support of my research and commented that I was returning Greenland to Canada piece by piece, we exchanged pleasant banter about the Hans Island dispute and how it should be resolved.

The spirit of our discussion reflected the formal negotiations between Canada and Denmark over the ownership of Hans Island.

In this dispute, the island itself and the sea around it are unimportant.

It is a tiny speck in the vastness of the Canadian Arctic and of Greenland. There are no potential economic resources on the island. It has no real strategic importance to either nation, nor has it value in their future commercial endeavours.

What is important about Hans Island is that the controversy has awakened Canadians to their Arctic in a manner unlike any since the sovereignty crisis created by the voyages of the supertanker, Manhattan, through the Northwest Passage in 1969 and 1970.

For most Canadians, the Arctic is a huge, cold, sparsely populated region that has limited relevance to us as individuals or even to the nation as a whole.

Yet, for example, the recent developments in diamond mining in the Arctic make Canada one of the major producers of diamonds in the world.

The industry brings significant revenue not just to the North but to all Canadians. The potential for sustainable exploitation of living resources from the polar sea holds similar promise.

The Arctic environment is being changed sooner and more greatly due to human-induced global effects than any other region on Earth except the fringes of Antarctica, even though the causes of these changes originate in the temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere.

Rising temperatures, shrinking glaciers and sea ice, changing ecology and threatened wildlife, and the impact of these on Arctic inhabitants must receive concerted and thoughtful attention by scientists, managers, politicians, and Northerners.

Greater resources should be committed to understanding our North and to mitigating the effects of these changes.

Consciousness of Hans Island helps justify this need in the minds of Canadians.

Along with the South Polar Region, the Arctic is the last unspoiled wilderness in the world.

This, too, conveys a special relation between Canadian people and their land, and a unique responsibility for its stewardship.

The Hans Island issue has also made us aware that there are important circumpolar environmental and human issues that may be profitably addressed by collaboration among northern nations.

Northerners have always been aware of this, based in part on the common ancestry of the Inuit in North America and Greenland.

What matters is not the ownership of a tiny island, or even that we agree to disagree about that ownership, but that the people of Canada, Denmark and the other polar nations recognize that they share responsibility for the most remarkable region on Earth.