DIGGING IN THE DEEP BLUE
While independent states have the right to exploit minerals and oil and gas (subject to national regulation) on their own land, the fine line between what is and isn’t allowed underwater is as blurred and murky as the view of the ocean seabed itself. The United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) provides notional international governance over the ocean floor. This decrees that anything beyond the continental shelf of a country is open water and can’t be exploited and means, in theory, that much of the Arctic Ocean will remain out of bounds and unclaimed. The continental shelf is the shallow extension of the continent’s landmass under the ocean, which drops precipitously to the sea floor. Within the boundaries of this shelf, there is first the notion of territorial sea, defined under UNCLOS as the 12-nauticalmile zone from the baseline or low-water line along the coast. The coastal state’s sovereignty extends to this territorial sea, including its seabed, subsoil and even the air space. Article 56 of UNCLOS outlines further rights. A country can declare an exclusive economic zone that extends 200 nautical miles from its coastline, over its continental shelf. Within this zone it possesses sovereign rights for exploration, exploitation, conservation and resource management of living and nonliving natural resources. Finally, UNCLOS stipulates that coastal states can claim an extended continental shelf, up to 350 nautical miles from the coast. If successful, this extends sovereign rights to that territory. In order to make this claim, the state must collect and analyse data describing the depth, shape and geophysical characteristics of the seabed and sub-sea floor. Norway, Canada, Denmark, the USA and Russia have all made such claims. Anything else is supposed to be out of bounds and protected by the International Seabed Authority (ISA), which is ultimately a UN agency. However, member states of the ISA are involved with the ISA secretariat in developing a code of practice that would permit mining. Despite repeated requests, the ISA wouldn’t be interviewed for this article, nor would it elaborate on the detail of the proposed code (its own website is at least 18 months out of date). However, ahead of any code, the ISA, whose express remit is to ‘ensure the effective protection of the marine environment from harmful effects that may arise from deep-seabedrelated activities’ has already approved 30 contracts for exploration involving 22 different countries and covering more than 1.3 million square kilometres of the seabed. These include permissions for deep-sea prospecting around polymetallic nodules, polymetallic sulphides and cobalt-rich ferromanganese crusts.