What lies beneath
When Russia dispatched a mini-submarine to plant a titanium flag four kilometres beneath the North Pole in 2007, the gesture was interpreted in some quarters as being tongue in cheek. Soon enough, however, it emerged that no humour was intended: the Russians were perfectly serious about laying claim to the seabed under the North Pole. They even produced rock samples that, they argued, proved that the Lomonosov Ridge, an undersea structure that runs across the Arctic Ocean, was part of Mother Russia.
But the Russians aren’t alone. Others also have their eyes on the Arctic seabed, which, according to US Geological Survey estimates, holds a quarter of the world’s undiscovered reserves of fossil fuels. And around the world, just about every nation with a coastline is now staking a claim to ocean seabed hundreds of kilometres from dry land.
In a peculiarly 21st-century dash for valuable undersea real estate, up to 50 countries have submitted evidence of the extended seabed beyond their coastline to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS), a panel created under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLS) to review and certify the legitimacy of such claims.
Traditionally, under Article 36 of the Law of the Sea, coastal states are granted exclusive oil and gas rights to waters within 200 nautical miles (370 kilometres) of their coastlines. But claims may be extended to up to 350 nautical miles if nations can provide scientific proof that the undersea continental plate is a natural extension of their territory. All seabed beyond these areas of national jurisdiction is known as the ‘Area’, international waters that belong, according to the UN, to the common heritage of humanity, and are administered by the International Seabed Authority.
May marked the deadline for those countries who ratified the UNCLS before 1999 to submit claims for ownership of the seabed. Those who ratified the convention more recently, or have yet to do so, have up to ten years to submit their own case. The one notable absentee from this activity is the USA, which has yet to ratify the treaty.
However, while this might sound nice and straightforward, it’s just the beginning of the ambiguities that plague this whole process. ‘A lot of international lawyers disagree with the view that nations had to claim it now or lose it, but in some ways that is the case,’ says Martin Pratt, director of research at the International Boundaries Research Unit, Durham University. ‘Governments didn’t want to miss the deadline in case it compromised their claims. It’s a murky legal area.’
Although the waters above the claimed areas will remain international, the Law of the Sea mandates that states can win the sole right to exploit anything on or beneath the seabed, including creatures that crawl along it, if they can convince the commission that the zones are a natural extension of their dry landmasses.
‘It isn’t an extension of sovereignty, it’s only an extension of sovereign rights for the purposes of exploring and exploiting its resources,’ says Hariharan Pakshi Rajan, a senior officer at the UN’s Division for Ocean Affairs and the Law of the Sea.
Scientifically, the natural prolongation of the land under the sea can go up to the end of the continental margin. Mapping has involved plotting submarine contours that mark the outer edges of the continental shelf and establishing the foot of an underwater continental slope, thousands of metres down. Criteria are moveable, to reflect the subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, differences in the geological and geomorphological characteristics of the seabed. ‘Governments are allowed to review submissions of other states, but the costs of surveying are so prohibitive that unless a state has acquired data, they couldn’t possibly afford to go and revisit a site, although they can question the data,’ says Pratt.
Conflicting claims
Some claims are more straightforward than others. One of the biggest areas approved so far belongs to Australia, an area about the size of Western Australia – around 2.5 million square kilometres – while Brazil secured the right to control a large area of Atlantic seabed and hopes to discover offshore oil deposits.
France is claiming the seabed around French Polynesia and New Caledonia, but has antagonised Canada with its pending claims over its North American territories. The row over the Falkland Islands is likely to flare up again, with both Argentina and the UK making competing claims to the adjacent seabed. Pakistan’s claim to new Indian Ocean territory is also unlikely to go unchallenged by its neighbours. More co-operatively, Britain, France, Ireland and Spain have jointly made a claim for 80,000 square kilometres of the ocean floor in the Celtic Sea and the Bay of Biscay, preferring to let the CLCS determine the limits of their continental shelf before negotiating among themselves how to divide up the territory.
In the Arctic, Denmark is scrutinising the seabed north of Greenland for the same reasons as Russia, while Canada has similar designs. Norway has moved more quickly than most: in April this year, the CLCS approved Norway’s claim to slices of the seabed in the Norwegian Sea, the Barents Sea and the Arctic Ocean.
Other nations laying claim to the seabed include Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Iceland, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Barbados, Indonesia and China. In contrast to the Arctic, Antarctica is, for now at least, off limits, with all claims mothballed through the Antarctic Treaty.Some of the most low-key claims may well prove to be the most successful, far-reaching and influential. These have been made by small islands states in the Indian and Pacific oceans, such as the Seychelles, Mauritius and the Cook Islands.
The claim by the Cook Islands is extraordinary, weighing in at 600,000 square kilometres, an area the size of France and 2,500 times the country’s total land area. ‘There is no doubt the Cook Islands are seeking to prioritise this,’ says Joshua Brien, economic and legal adviser at the Commonwealth secretariat, which helped the islands and other former British colonies to submit claims. ‘They already know they have resources in the form of manganese nodules with their original territory, but what could be beyond that? No-one has a clue. It’s a potential investment in their future.’
China appears to be set for a series of collisions involving overlapping claims. It has objected to Japanese claims (see Between a rock and a hard place), but is also in disagreement with Vietnam and Malaysia (which have, in turn, submitted claims that clash with those of the Philippines and Brunei) for the Spratly and Paracel islands and the South China Sea waters around them. China is also at odds with South Korea over the East China Sea.
Untold riches
As with previous territorial grabs, hoped-for riches lie at the bottom of this activity. In many cases, such as the Cook Islands, the rewards remain unclear, but elsewhere, they are more focused. Oil and gas are obvious targets: the continental margins are made up of sedimentary material washed off the continent, and this is where oil and gas tends to be found.
Farther out, the prospects for fossil fuels diminish, and interest shifts to other resources. ‘It could be minerals from thermal vents,’ says Pratt. ‘Others will be looking at biological resources, such as plants and other creatures that may provide medicinal material from the seabed.’
‘The pharmaceutical and biomedical industries are going crazy about these,’ says Dr Lindsay Parson, head of the UK Law of the Sea Group at the National Oceanography Centre at the University of Southampton. ‘These ecosystems involve creatures living very deep and growing very slowly. When they mature, they can contain biochemical components of huge potential medical use, such as in tumour-shrinking compounds and cholesterol-busting statins.’
And it isn’t just the possession of these various resources that excites governments. Lucrative licences are also at stake. Last year, New Zealand won approval for its claim to 1.7 million square kilometres of extended continental shelf seabed. The New Zealand government already earns more than £38million a year in royalties and other income from the seabed within its exclusive economic zone.
Such licensing schemes may also explain why several developing nations have invited Western countries to carry out their seabed monitoring and prepare their case. Kenya’s application was supported, like many others, by a Norway-based data office, set up under a UN resolution.
Out of sight
Yet the prospect of governments and mining companies excavating the seabed, out of sight of public scrutiny, makes some conservationists uneasy. ‘The legitimacy of claims needs to be called into question,’ says Dr David Santillo of the Greenpeace Research Laboratories at Exeter University. ‘You’ll get waste disposal over a wide area and that could see changes in sea plankton. Deposits of minerals tend to be adjacent to areas of important biodiversity. These can involve particularly sensitive, slow-growing marine species. There will be damage over a wide area. Companies will say they will minimise damage, but this is about more than ploughing up a field.’
The nature of any excavation would mean that it would be carried out without the danger of campaigners turning up and exposing damaging activity. ‘If we were in a position of being able to trust governments and mining companies, then you could be more comfortable with some activity, but that isn’t the case – their track record on the surface of the Earth is poor,’ says Santillo.
‘The only people who would be able to afford the equipment and ship time to verify activity would be the companies and countries involved, who have a strong commercial interest,’ he continues. ‘It’s completely beyond the realms of adequate oversight and control. There needs to be more governance and much more visibility – telling the public where activity is likely to take place and the nature of that work. Information needs to come into the public domain at the earliest opportunity, but typically governments and companies cite commercial confidentiality or take many years to publish such data.’
Impacts will happen, Parson admits, but he points out that governments have legal responsibilities to protect marine life. ‘One can only take a view that exploration has been going on for many hundreds of years, and is something that will have to take place as part of the human process. The technology to recover these resources sustainably and securely is not yet in place but there is no doubt that it will be.’
Stretching the boundaries
In the meantime, the deliberations over who can go where will take time. The 21 commission members – experts in geology, geophysics and hydrography, appointed from all regions of the world – work part
time, and the CLCS says that it might need until 2035 to review all of the claims, counter-claims, appeals and disagreements. This summer, the commission was scheduled to hear oral presentations from 29 countries, while representatives from seven others have been invited to make submissions in person next year.
Some overlapping claims have resulted in the issuing of dispute notices to the UN, and while the UN can’t adjudicate in such disputes, it’s clear that some states have stretched the bounds of scientific reason and probability with their claims. In some cases, countries that are ‘zone-locked’ – that is, unable to extend claims to the 200- or 350-nautical-mile limits because another landmass gets in the way – are doing just that. Cameroon, China and Trinidad and Tobago, for example, are all understood to have submitted claims beyond 200 nautical miles in areas where it could be argued that it isn’t physically possible for there to be any claim.
The final stop for unresolved disputes would be the International Court of Justice in The Hague. ‘There will be differences of approach – that’s the natural way of the world,’ says Parson. ‘Some states may be competing in a more expansive way than others. Some states will find their claims moderated by the commission.’
The problem, Pratt points out, is that the methods for determining the limits of the continental shelf ‘are a little complicated’. ‘States can mix and match criteria to create the best possible outcome,’ he says. ‘Locating the foot of the slope is as much an art as a science.’Disputes are likely to emerge and harden in the decades ahead, according to Pratt. ‘States are thinking long term,’ he says. ‘We’re talking about remote areas, at least 200 nautical miles from the nearest land, and very deep, physically harsh conditions. Right now, most of these areas are of very limited value, unless the price of oil really shoots up. But long term, 30 or 50 years from now, they are potentially of great value. The cost of exploiting these resources can drop. In the 1960s, it was deemed too expensive to drill for oil in 30 metres of water, now you can drill for three kilometres.’
But Santillo believes that activity and the potential for stand offs could come more rapidly. ‘Such exploration only ever makes sense when the market price for minerals is reasonably high,’ he says. ‘But in some parts of the world, the electronics revolution is creating a demand that makes excavation look a more likely prospect for some minerals.’
The scramble for the seabed has, it seems, only just begun. But comparisons with the colonial conquests of centuries past may not be entirely relevant, and at the very least, developing nations will be able to profit from lucrative rights sales. ‘It’s not like the scramble for Africa, it’s more orderly than that,’ says Pratt. ‘It will still probably be the wealthier nations that benefit most, but at least smaller countries will benefit from the licences they will issue.’
August 2009
But the Russians aren’t alone. Others also have their eyes on the Arctic seabed, which, according to US Geological Survey estimates, holds a quarter of the world’s undiscovered reserves of fossil fuels. And around the world, just about every nation with a coastline is now staking a claim to ocean seabed hundreds of kilometres from dry land.
In a peculiarly 21st-century dash for valuable undersea real estate, up to 50 countries have submitted evidence of the extended seabed beyond their coastline to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS), a panel created under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLS) to review and certify the legitimacy of such claims.
Traditionally, under Article 36 of the Law of the Sea, coastal states are granted exclusive oil and gas rights to waters within 200 nautical miles (370 kilometres) of their coastlines. But claims may be extended to up to 350 nautical miles if nations can provide scientific proof that the undersea continental plate is a natural extension of their territory. All seabed beyond these areas of national jurisdiction is known as the ‘Area’, international waters that belong, according to the UN, to the common heritage of humanity, and are administered by the International Seabed Authority.
May marked the deadline for those countries who ratified the UNCLS before 1999 to submit claims for ownership of the seabed. Those who ratified the convention more recently, or have yet to do so, have up to ten years to submit their own case. The one notable absentee from this activity is the USA, which has yet to ratify the treaty.
However, while this might sound nice and straightforward, it’s just the beginning of the ambiguities that plague this whole process. ‘A lot of international lawyers disagree with the view that nations had to claim it now or lose it, but in some ways that is the case,’ says Martin Pratt, director of research at the International Boundaries Research Unit, Durham University. ‘Governments didn’t want to miss the deadline in case it compromised their claims. It’s a murky legal area.’
Although the waters above the claimed areas will remain international, the Law of the Sea mandates that states can win the sole right to exploit anything on or beneath the seabed, including creatures that crawl along it, if they can convince the commission that the zones are a natural extension of their dry landmasses.
‘It isn’t an extension of sovereignty, it’s only an extension of sovereign rights for the purposes of exploring and exploiting its resources,’ says Hariharan Pakshi Rajan, a senior officer at the UN’s Division for Ocean Affairs and the Law of the Sea.
Scientifically, the natural prolongation of the land under the sea can go up to the end of the continental margin. Mapping has involved plotting submarine contours that mark the outer edges of the continental shelf and establishing the foot of an underwater continental slope, thousands of metres down. Criteria are moveable, to reflect the subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, differences in the geological and geomorphological characteristics of the seabed. ‘Governments are allowed to review submissions of other states, but the costs of surveying are so prohibitive that unless a state has acquired data, they couldn’t possibly afford to go and revisit a site, although they can question the data,’ says Pratt.
Conflicting claims
Some claims are more straightforward than others. One of the biggest areas approved so far belongs to Australia, an area about the size of Western Australia – around 2.5 million square kilometres – while Brazil secured the right to control a large area of Atlantic seabed and hopes to discover offshore oil deposits.
France is claiming the seabed around French Polynesia and New Caledonia, but has antagonised Canada with its pending claims over its North American territories. The row over the Falkland Islands is likely to flare up again, with both Argentina and the UK making competing claims to the adjacent seabed. Pakistan’s claim to new Indian Ocean territory is also unlikely to go unchallenged by its neighbours. More co-operatively, Britain, France, Ireland and Spain have jointly made a claim for 80,000 square kilometres of the ocean floor in the Celtic Sea and the Bay of Biscay, preferring to let the CLCS determine the limits of their continental shelf before negotiating among themselves how to divide up the territory.
In the Arctic, Denmark is scrutinising the seabed north of Greenland for the same reasons as Russia, while Canada has similar designs. Norway has moved more quickly than most: in April this year, the CLCS approved Norway’s claim to slices of the seabed in the Norwegian Sea, the Barents Sea and the Arctic Ocean.
Other nations laying claim to the seabed include Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Iceland, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Barbados, Indonesia and China. In contrast to the Arctic, Antarctica is, for now at least, off limits, with all claims mothballed through the Antarctic Treaty.Some of the most low-key claims may well prove to be the most successful, far-reaching and influential. These have been made by small islands states in the Indian and Pacific oceans, such as the Seychelles, Mauritius and the Cook Islands.
The claim by the Cook Islands is extraordinary, weighing in at 600,000 square kilometres, an area the size of France and 2,500 times the country’s total land area. ‘There is no doubt the Cook Islands are seeking to prioritise this,’ says Joshua Brien, economic and legal adviser at the Commonwealth secretariat, which helped the islands and other former British colonies to submit claims. ‘They already know they have resources in the form of manganese nodules with their original territory, but what could be beyond that? No-one has a clue. It’s a potential investment in their future.’
China appears to be set for a series of collisions involving overlapping claims. It has objected to Japanese claims (see Between a rock and a hard place), but is also in disagreement with Vietnam and Malaysia (which have, in turn, submitted claims that clash with those of the Philippines and Brunei) for the Spratly and Paracel islands and the South China Sea waters around them. China is also at odds with South Korea over the East China Sea.
Untold riches
As with previous territorial grabs, hoped-for riches lie at the bottom of this activity. In many cases, such as the Cook Islands, the rewards remain unclear, but elsewhere, they are more focused. Oil and gas are obvious targets: the continental margins are made up of sedimentary material washed off the continent, and this is where oil and gas tends to be found.
Farther out, the prospects for fossil fuels diminish, and interest shifts to other resources. ‘It could be minerals from thermal vents,’ says Pratt. ‘Others will be looking at biological resources, such as plants and other creatures that may provide medicinal material from the seabed.’
‘The pharmaceutical and biomedical industries are going crazy about these,’ says Dr Lindsay Parson, head of the UK Law of the Sea Group at the National Oceanography Centre at the University of Southampton. ‘These ecosystems involve creatures living very deep and growing very slowly. When they mature, they can contain biochemical components of huge potential medical use, such as in tumour-shrinking compounds and cholesterol-busting statins.’
And it isn’t just the possession of these various resources that excites governments. Lucrative licences are also at stake. Last year, New Zealand won approval for its claim to 1.7 million square kilometres of extended continental shelf seabed. The New Zealand government already earns more than £38million a year in royalties and other income from the seabed within its exclusive economic zone.
Such licensing schemes may also explain why several developing nations have invited Western countries to carry out their seabed monitoring and prepare their case. Kenya’s application was supported, like many others, by a Norway-based data office, set up under a UN resolution.
Out of sight
Yet the prospect of governments and mining companies excavating the seabed, out of sight of public scrutiny, makes some conservationists uneasy. ‘The legitimacy of claims needs to be called into question,’ says Dr David Santillo of the Greenpeace Research Laboratories at Exeter University. ‘You’ll get waste disposal over a wide area and that could see changes in sea plankton. Deposits of minerals tend to be adjacent to areas of important biodiversity. These can involve particularly sensitive, slow-growing marine species. There will be damage over a wide area. Companies will say they will minimise damage, but this is about more than ploughing up a field.’
The nature of any excavation would mean that it would be carried out without the danger of campaigners turning up and exposing damaging activity. ‘If we were in a position of being able to trust governments and mining companies, then you could be more comfortable with some activity, but that isn’t the case – their track record on the surface of the Earth is poor,’ says Santillo.
‘The only people who would be able to afford the equipment and ship time to verify activity would be the companies and countries involved, who have a strong commercial interest,’ he continues. ‘It’s completely beyond the realms of adequate oversight and control. There needs to be more governance and much more visibility – telling the public where activity is likely to take place and the nature of that work. Information needs to come into the public domain at the earliest opportunity, but typically governments and companies cite commercial confidentiality or take many years to publish such data.’
Impacts will happen, Parson admits, but he points out that governments have legal responsibilities to protect marine life. ‘One can only take a view that exploration has been going on for many hundreds of years, and is something that will have to take place as part of the human process. The technology to recover these resources sustainably and securely is not yet in place but there is no doubt that it will be.’
Stretching the boundaries
In the meantime, the deliberations over who can go where will take time. The 21 commission members – experts in geology, geophysics and hydrography, appointed from all regions of the world – work part
time, and the CLCS says that it might need until 2035 to review all of the claims, counter-claims, appeals and disagreements. This summer, the commission was scheduled to hear oral presentations from 29 countries, while representatives from seven others have been invited to make submissions in person next year.
Some overlapping claims have resulted in the issuing of dispute notices to the UN, and while the UN can’t adjudicate in such disputes, it’s clear that some states have stretched the bounds of scientific reason and probability with their claims. In some cases, countries that are ‘zone-locked’ – that is, unable to extend claims to the 200- or 350-nautical-mile limits because another landmass gets in the way – are doing just that. Cameroon, China and Trinidad and Tobago, for example, are all understood to have submitted claims beyond 200 nautical miles in areas where it could be argued that it isn’t physically possible for there to be any claim.
The final stop for unresolved disputes would be the International Court of Justice in The Hague. ‘There will be differences of approach – that’s the natural way of the world,’ says Parson. ‘Some states may be competing in a more expansive way than others. Some states will find their claims moderated by the commission.’
The problem, Pratt points out, is that the methods for determining the limits of the continental shelf ‘are a little complicated’. ‘States can mix and match criteria to create the best possible outcome,’ he says. ‘Locating the foot of the slope is as much an art as a science.’Disputes are likely to emerge and harden in the decades ahead, according to Pratt. ‘States are thinking long term,’ he says. ‘We’re talking about remote areas, at least 200 nautical miles from the nearest land, and very deep, physically harsh conditions. Right now, most of these areas are of very limited value, unless the price of oil really shoots up. But long term, 30 or 50 years from now, they are potentially of great value. The cost of exploiting these resources can drop. In the 1960s, it was deemed too expensive to drill for oil in 30 metres of water, now you can drill for three kilometres.’
But Santillo believes that activity and the potential for stand offs could come more rapidly. ‘Such exploration only ever makes sense when the market price for minerals is reasonably high,’ he says. ‘But in some parts of the world, the electronics revolution is creating a demand that makes excavation look a more likely prospect for some minerals.’
The scramble for the seabed has, it seems, only just begun. But comparisons with the colonial conquests of centuries past may not be entirely relevant, and at the very least, developing nations will be able to profit from lucrative rights sales. ‘It’s not like the scramble for Africa, it’s more orderly than that,’ says Pratt. ‘It will still probably be the wealthier nations that benefit most, but at least smaller countries will benefit from the licences they will issue.’
August 2009
 | |
