The scramble for the seabed
Suddenly, a wider world below the waterline
May 14th 2009
From
The Economist print edition
Coastal states have now made their bids for vast new areas of continental shelf
YOU never know what may come in handy. That is the principle behind the rush for the seabed that reached a climax of sorts this week with the deadline on May 13th for lodging claims to extensions of the continental shelf. When Russia sold Alaska to the United States for two cents an acre (five cents a hectare) in 1867, it thought it was parting with a useless lump of ice. After gold was discovered there, it began kicking itself. Now it is one of a host of countries eagerly laying claim to swathes of the seafloor that may one day yield huge riches. That is the hope anyway.
The rules for this carve-up derive from the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. These gave all countries that had ratified the treaty before May 13th 1999 ten years in which to claim any extension of their continental shelf beyond the normal 200 nautical miles (370km), so long as that extension was no more than 100 miles from the point at which the sea reached a depth of 2.5km, and no more than 350 miles from land. Any other country wishing to make a claim has ten years from the date on which it ratified the treaty. It must then, like all the states that have now made their claims, submit copious scientific evidence to show that the seabed in question is indeed continental shelf.
If it passes all the tests, it can exploit the minerals on or under the seabed in this margin, so long as any revenue is shared with poorer and landlocked states. No new rights are given over fish or other creatures in the water column, but living creatures on or below the seafloor that are immobile “at the harvestable stage” are treated like minerals. Harvesting here is not entirely fanciful. Pharmaceutical companies are already mincing up marine creatures known as sea cucumbers that may yet provide drugs for treating cancer. Sea cucumbers can move, but other useful plants or animals may be stuck in the mud.
More beguiling perhaps are metal deposits and energy reserves. These include not just petroleum but also methane hydrates, white, sorbet-like compounds that exist in profusion under the sea, perhaps containing more energy in total than all known deposits of fossil fuels. They can often be found on the slopes of the continental shelf, though as yet they are impossibly awkward to extract. In the long run, however, they may prove valuable to countries like Japan and India with few energy sources on land.
For many countries, though, the first booty from any newly acquired seabed will be either oil or gas, both of which can now be extracted fairly easily from deep water. It was surely with this in mind that Russia, in 2001 the first country to submit a continental-shelf claim, made a bid to extend its rights in both the Pacific and the Arctic oceans. Six years later a Russian submersible was to plant a titanium flag on the seabed 4km below the North Pole.
Since the Russian application, 49 others have followed, some making multiple claims in several places, some submitted jointly by several countries in one area. Some countries have also made more than one submission. Thus Britain, France, Ireland and Spain have jointly made a claim in the Celtic sea and the Bay of Biscay. Britain has made a second in respect of Ascension island in the South Atlantic, a third concerning the Hatton-Rockall area in the North Atlantic and a fourth concerning the Falklands, South Georgia and the South Sandwich islands in the South Atlantic.
All of this last area is also claimed by Argentina, which went to war with Britain in 1982 over the Falklands. It will now be hotly contested again. Argentina’s latest claim, moreover, appears to include land and sea right down to the South Pole, to judge by the map filed with its submission.
This is not the only place in which two countries have competing designs. China and South Korea are at odds over a part of the East China sea. And China has submitted a map that seems to assert ownership of a vast part of the South China sea. This includes much more than the Spratlys, an island group long claimed by Malaysia, the Philippines and Taiwan too. China objected within hours to Vietnam’s Spratlys claim on May 7th.
Trouble is also brewing in the Indian ocean. Tanzania and the Seychelles look like falling out over an area near Aldabra, and Mauritius has claimed an area round Rodrigues island that includes the Chagos archipelago. This is regarded by Britain as part of its Indian Ocean Territory. It includes Diego Garcia, whose people, all removed in the 1970s so that the island could be used as an American base, last year lost a legal appeal to be allowed home.
Another old imperial power, France, is also hoping to make the most of its residual colonies, and in doing so is antagonising friends. Its clash is with Canada, and concerns St Pierre & Miquelon, a group of tiny islands little more than 25km from Newfoundland that front onto a shelf blessed with oil deposits. They belong to France.
Canada did not ratify the law-of-the-sea treaty until 2003, so has no need to submit its claims until 2013. Denmark likewise has until 2014, and the United States has no deadline since it has not ratified the treaty . These are three of the five countries that border on the richest, and trickiest, prize of all, the Arctic (Denmark because it owns Greenland, unless and until the Greenlanders should become independent, as some wish). All five states have ambitions for more Arctic seabed.
Most of the Arctic is continental shelf, so most of it will eventually be allotted to one of the five neighbours (Iceland also has a small claim within the Arctic Circle). But since it has been largely covered with year-round ice throughout modern history, it is the least mapped ocean. Claims are therefore specially hard to substantiate.
The Arctic is rich in oil and gas. Indeed, some people think it holds nearly a quarter of the world’s undiscovered reserves. Though Russia put in an early four-part bid under the treaty, the part concerning the Arctic has in effect been shelved. So the only submission under active consideration is Norway’s. Each of the other Arctic neighbours, however, is busy mapping and preparing the data needed for claims already made public (see map below).
Clashes are plain between Canada and the United States, and between Russia and Norway. And Canada, Denmark and Russia are each likely to make individual bids for the North Pole. Even so, there is a lot of co-operation among the competitors. Canada and Denmark, for instance, are working together to try to show that the Lomonosov ridge, which cuts across the Arctic and is the basis of Russia’s claim for the pole, extends to their territories.
Similar co-operation has taken place among countries in other parts of the world. Most coastal states that knew a claim would be contested have made agreements that one would not object to a neighbour’s bid if the other showed reciprocal forbearance. Many of the joint submissions will be followed by further deal-making among the states concerned.
Formally, all states now have three months in which to make protests. In reality, they have much longer. Some of the submissions are not firm, merely “indicative” bids that will serve as holding operations. Even now the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, the body that considers the claims, is in danger of being overwhelmed. It must rule on everything from the geophysical (is the sedimentary composition correct?) to the metaphysical (what’s the difference between a rock and an island?). A month ago it had given full consideration and approval to only five of the 22 claims lodged. Since then another 28 have followed.
The commission will encourage states to settle squabbles by negotiation. If they fail, they can go to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, or to a special tribunal in Hamburg. But too much should not be made of the disputation. The most remarkable feature of the seabed scramble is that it gives the potential of huge economic gains to some of the world’s smallest and poorest countries—coastal states in Africa, island nations in the Pacific, poor places like Barbados, Suriname and Yemen, none of them usually seen as sophisticated maritime powers. If they are now lucky enough to gain new rights over oil or minerals, they may soon be able to exploit them. Neptune should be smiling.
