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The tiny eastern Mediterranean country of Cyprus is expected to become the fifth eurozone nation to receive a bailout. But the island-nation, which is about half the size of Connecticut, could soon access a massive treasure under the sea: natural gas.

If all goes well, Cyprus could start making more than $25 billion a year — about the same as the country's current GDP — starting as early as 2015, says Solon Kassinis. Twenty years ago, few listened to the engineer when he said there was gas and oil under the seabed.

"A lot of people, especially geologists, geophysicists, they didn't believe in the region. They didn't think that there was oil and gas," he says.

But Kassinis, who's now the energy chief of Cyprus, insisted the conditions for gas and oil deposits — such as a thick sedimentary basin and sea steam — were there.

Houston-based Noble Energy listened. Its engineers surveyed the area in 2008, and the company began exploratory drilling in 2011. The company worked on a block of the seabed called the Aphrodite gas field, located off the southern coast of Cyprus, says Fiona Mullen, an economist following the project.

"Noble Energy did the drilling in September, and they announced in December that they had found an estimated 7 trillion cubic feet, which is enough to supply domestic consumption for something like 200 years," Mullen says. "So there's obviously spare for export."

Troubled Politics

But there's also a complication. Cyprus has frigid relations with its neighbor, Turkey, which has even threatened military action to stop the drilling.

"Turkey's particularly sensitive about the area to the west of the island, because they claim some blocks there belong to its own continental shelf," Mullen says. "With the Aphrodite field, its argument is not as aggressive. Turkey says Greek Cypriots don't have the right to govern the Republic of Cyprus alone. They ought to govern with the Turkish Cypriots."

Turkey has occupied the northern half of Cyprus since 1974. The division has embittered Greek and Turkish Cypriots, whose leaders tend to marinate in that difficult past, says Ergun Olgun, a former presidential adviser to the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyrprus, which is only recognized by Turkey.

"Hydrocarbons can be a curse or a kismet," Olgun says. "The key to it not becoming a curse is to understand that we are interdependent. Interdependence means respecting each other, but that can only happen if we break from the past."

Olgun says Greek Cypriots rejected a Turkish Cypriot plan to resolve the country's division before moving forward on hydrocarbons exploration.

"Instead what we have is new alliances being built around Cyprus, which are making the conflict even more dangerous," he says. "The alliances, for example, with Cyprus and Israel, [and] Turkish Cypriots and Turkey deepening their own alliance by going into agreements with other."

Not Just Economic Calculations

Cyprus could save a lot of money by piping the gas directly to Turkey, which could, because of its proximity, be its biggest customer. Instead the Greek Cypriots plan to liquefy the gas and partner with Israel on a pipeline.

Israel has fragile relations with Turkey, which is now drilling for oil on land in the plains of northern Cyprus.

Supervisor Cem Cetin says his team arrived earlier this year at a drilling site for the state-owned Turkish Petroleum Corporation.

"We import oil and gas from other countries," Cetin says. If the company finds hydrocarbons, he adds, "We are going to share with Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus."

You can see the Turkish Petroleum rig from the nearby village of Sinirustu, where Turkish farmer Sabri Aydag has lived since 1976. Before 1974, most of the people who lived here were Greek. The Greek Cypriots still call the village Syngrasis.

"The drilling will improve the village, since Turkish Petroleum has already given farmers 700 fields," Aydag says. "This village will turn into a proper town."

Turkey is also planning to drill offshore, just like everyone else in the region, says Praxoula Antoniadou-Kyriakou, a Greek Cypriot and a former energy minister.

"The whole of the eastern Mediterranean [is] loaded with hydrocarbons," she says. "Israel, Egypt, Cyprus and Lebanon now contemplate ... exploration."

If the countries can put the past behind them and work together to manage hydrocarbons, she says, the region could become a place of peace and prosperity.

But the history here feels thicker than the seabed, she says. And it's far more explosive than the gas that lies beneath.

In northern Syria, near the Turkish border, Bashar al-Assad's army has already been forced out by rebel forces. Now the town of Jerablus faces new challenges: a lack of support from the international community, buildings still in ruins and a flood of refugees.

Sierra Leone's "blood diamonds" helped fuel atrocities in the impoverished West African nation in the 1990s. The war has now been over for a decade, and the country's most valuable resource is no longer known as the product of a conflict. But it remains a contentious issue.

As Sierra Leoneans go to the polls Saturday, the country's diamonds are at the heart of political parties' manifestos. Opposition parties accuse the government of mortgaging lucrative diamond fields for a "pittance," while President Ernest Bai Koroma boasts of his "ambitious" efforts to transform the industry.

In diamond-rich Kono district, in the eastern part of the country, previous elections have been fiercely protested.

While the country's parliamentary election is expected to be relatively peaceful, this hub of diamond mining in the country shows a bitter irony: It's resource rich, but poverty abounds as development here has not kept pace with other parts of the country.

In Koidu, the capital of Kono, women and children stand knee deep in the fields on either side of the dusty potholed roads.

Enlarge Issouf Sanogo/AFP/Getty Images

Small-scale artisanal mining has sustained this area since diamonds were discovered in 1930, but it is hard work and the pay is low.

Director Ang Lee has a surprising affinity for the Indian hero of Life of Pi — that's his name, Pi, and he's seen at several ages but principally as a 17-year-old boy adrift on a lifeboat in the South Pacific. He's the lone survivor of a shipwreck that killed the crew, his family and a variety of zoo animals his father was transporting to North America for sale.

Actually, Pi is the lone human survivor. He shares his boat and its dwindling food supplies with a man-eating Bengal tiger.

Lee is a director whose works I've admired more than loved. All of his movies — among them Sense and Sensibility, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Brokeback Mountain, even Hulk — center on emotions that bump up against rigid codes of behavior — emotions that can't be suppressed and finally erupt.

Lee's range of genres and settings is impressive, but there's something about his meticulousness that keeps me at a distance. I know that many people loved Brokeback Mountain, but I got hung up on the mythical cowboy iconography, that forbidden love sanctified by purple mountain majesties. Lee makes movies about giving in to passion — without seeming to let go.

But Life of Pi is different. Most of the film is a flashback, a tale told to a writer by the middle-aged Pi. And the way Lee depicts it — in a style that's typically fastidious and arty — is astonishingly in sync with his narrator.

That lifeboat in which most of the movie takes place is a wondrous set, not realistic but not fake, either — transcendentally in-between. The water is ultra-ultramarine, the sea a mirror in which clouds above seem to mingle with sharks, dorados, luminous jellyfish, even whales below.

The orange of the tiger burns as bright as in William Blake's immortal poem. The 3-D is brilliantly effective in creating multiple planes of reality, and it also allows Lee to hold shots for longer than any studio would let him if not for that marvelously immersive technology.

This isn't just a gorgeous survival story: The search for higher meaning runs all through the movie, as it does through Yann Martel's best-selling novel.

Growing up, Pi was drawn to multiple faiths. He thanks Vishnu for introducing him to Christ while rolling out his prayer mat to honor Allah. The kid subscribes to everything. But on the lifeboat, it seems as if none of his many gods will even acknowledge his existence. He's terribly alone — except, of course, for you-know-who.

Enlarge 20th Century Fox

As if being lost at sea isn't daunting for a teenager, Pi's companion on his lifeboat is a Bengal tiger. Life of Pi is based on Yann Martel's 2001 Man Booker Prize-winning novel.