It’s all go for people claiming the sea floor.
First off: Australia has become the the first country to successfully claim an extension of its rights to all the oil, gas and crabs around its shores. The UN has accepted its 2004 submission that its rights should go beyond the standard 200 nautical miles.
“I am pleased to announce that Australia, the largest island in the world, has just been dramatically increased in size,” says Resources Minister Martin Ferguson (various, eg The Age). The Sydney Morning Herald reports this under the headline .Australia gets bigger and richer’. (Map of the new area.)
Getting any fossil fuel goodness out of the sea floor could be tricky though. “These are the more remote areas,” Mark Allcock of Geoscience Australia told AAP. “Everybody likes to get to the easy stuff and it is the difficult stuff that you go to later. This is the more difficult stuff.”
Over in Russia, a new expedition has set off to gather more evidence for a claim to the floor under the Arctic (see Nature feature).
“It is no secret that polar countries are trying to make the Arctic an international resource,” says expedition leader Artur Chilingarov (RIA Novosti). “We, however, must make it plain to the global community that we will not give up our interests in the Arctic.”
Argentina says it will submit its claim by the 2009 deadline. This is likely to be quite controversial given the country’s disagreement with the UK over the what it calls the Malvinas (and the UK calls the Falkland Islands).
Even Micronesia is getting in on the action, with more funding being sought for research on its claims.
“I strongly believes that although Palau may not have the means to exploit the abundance of resources found in its continental shelf and beyond, it is still the duty and obligation of today’s generation to secure and bring into national jurisdiction Palau’s potential extended maritime boundary for the use of Palau’s future generations,” says Marvin Ngirutang, who was recently awarded the Hamilton Shirley Amerasinghe Fellowship on the Law of the Sea.
Image: Getty