A meeting between Iceland, Britain, Ireland and Denmark has taken place in order to try to resolve a long-running dispute over an isolated lump of storm-battered granite in the North Atlantic.

Rockall, an uninhabited islet, has long been a point of territorial contention due to its location upon a resource-rich ocean floor, with Iceland, Britain, Ireland and Denmark (via the Faroe Islands, a Danish dependency) all making claims to the continental shelf on which it’s perched.

The meeting took place in Reykjavik, Iceland, with representatives from all four countries attending to discuss the possibility of dividing the seabed surrounding Rockall in a way that would allow them to make a joint claim to the UN, which has introduced a new set of rules, under which states can claim the ocean floor linked to their own land mass – providing there are no disputes – before May 2009. 

Under the 1982 Laws of the Sea Convention, coastal states were allowed to claim the seabed within 200 miles (321 kilometres) of their shores if it formed part of the same continental shelf. The new rules have extended this to 350 miles (563 kilometres), reigniting territorial debates such as this and leading to new claims that saw Russian explorers plant a titanium flag on the sea floor under the Arctic in September and, more recently, several new claims to Antarctic territory.

As Geographical went to press, a second meeting was due to take place in Copenhagen. ‘If we do not succeed in reaching an agreement, the natural resources [around Rockall] will remain unexploited and an extensive and costly collection of data will have been wasted on nothing,’ said Tomas Heidar, legal adviser to Iceland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

December 2007