Last month, the United States added its territory by nearly 386,000 square miles, an area almost double the size of Spain.
This increase was due to the addition of submerged offshore areas, or extended continental shelf (ECS), in six areas in the country’s overall landmass. The US Department of state (DOS) officially declared this increase, allowing the nation to assert more surrounding ocean-floor territory, a Daily Mail report said.
The regions incorporating the ECS consist the Arctic, the Atlantic east coast, the Bering Sea, the Pacific west coast, the Mariana Islands, and two areas in the Gulf of Mexico. The largest ECS area is in the Arctic, while the overall ECS areas are about double the size of California.
The Wilson Center, a think tank based in Washington, DC, highlighted the significance of this announcement for safeguarding US territorial rights in the Arctic. The ECS in the Arctic stretches north upto 350 nautical miles in the east and over 680 nautical miles in the west from the territorial sea baselines of the United States. This extension corresponds to 1990 agreement with Russia over the maritime boundary through the Bering Strait, removing the necessity for future negotiations.
Brian Van Pay, State Department project director, said that Canada might have overlapping claims, which can be negotiated in the future. The extended continental shelf claim aligns with the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea provisions. However ,the US Senate has never ratified this treaty, the government is now announcing its continental shelf limits after 40 years.
The DOS head the ECS effort through the US ECS Task Force, consisting 14 government agencies. “The continental shelf is the addition of a country’s land territory under the sea,” the DOS stated. “Like other countries, the United States has rights under international law to preserve and safeguard the resources and vital habitats on and under its ECS.”
Determining the ECS outer limits required extensive data on the seabed and subsoil’s depth, shape, and geophysical characteristics. “Forty missions at sea, going to areas that we’ve never explored before, discovering entire seamounts we didn’t even know existed,” said Van Pay. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the US Geological Survey (USGS) collected and analyzed the necessary data, marking the largest offshore mapping effort ever undertaken by the United States.
The Wilson Center said, “It has long been clear that the United States has major economic interests in an undersea territory rich in oil, natural gas, minerals and sea life to which it has sovereign rights under the law of the sea as reflected in the Law of the Sea Convention.” They also highlighted the milestone’s importance in reflecting US engagement with the law of the sea and advancing major US interests in the Arctic and other regions.
