Conflicts over seabed rights are only going to get worse — here’s why 

In December, one of America’s largest territorial expansions took place, with barely any public notice. 

The U.S. has claimed sovereignty over 1 million square kilometers — larger than Texas and Arizona combined — of Arctic seabed near Alaska. This enormous territorial claim highlights an era of conflict that is emerging, fueled by technology, economics, business competition and geopolitics.  

Although most policymakers rarely think about seabeds, they have been important in geopolitics and in the fishing, telecommunications and petroleum industries for a century, and recently in the Internet and mining industries. At the same time, the issue has risen to the top of the agenda for environmentalists, international lawyers and the United Nations.  

As we learned in school, about 70 percent of the Earth’s surface consists of oceans — which includes seabeds. However, the policy framework for emerging seabed conflicts is complicated, to say the least.  

Geologists, admirals, diplomats and international lawyers, along with related industries, divide the seabed into two general categories: coastal, which means a portion of the seabed is controlled by a coastal nation, and deep ocean / high seas, which are outside of any single nation’s jurisdiction. But the dividing line between seabeds changes over time, and conflicting territorial claims between countries do arise.  

Often, the division of the seabed between neighboring countries is set through a negotiated bilateral agreement, such as Canada and the U.S. However, countries sometimes do not agree over conflicting seabed claims, as is the case for Greece and Turkey.  

The seabed is, after all, the source of important fisheries and vast amounts of petroleum/natural gas and other minerals. And it has served as the location of important manmade fixtures like undersea cables, undersea pipelines, military installations and more.  

So, who controls which portion of the seabed can be a pretty big deal.  

This was a principal reason the U.N. has conducted several major conferences to establish global rules for the oceans — and particularly for the seabed. The most important of these took place from 1973-1982, and it produced a detailed and complex set of rules — the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) — defining which country controls which portion of the seabed.  

To omit important caveats and vastly oversimplify mountains of international law, each coastal country has a 12-mile territorial sea, which includes a portion of the seabed and is considered part of that nation’s territory. Each also has a 200-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ), which includes its water column and seabed, as well as exclusive rights to the economic use of the natural continental shelf — oil, gas, mining, seabed fishing, etc. — if it extends beyond the EEZ’s 200 miles, up to 350 miles.  

Beyond the 200-mile zone or the end of the continental shelf up to 350 miles are the high seas, where the seabed is considered to be “the common heritage of mankind” and is effectively under the control of a U.N. agency, the International Seabed Authority (ISA.) 

Although the U.S. never ratified UNCLOS, it does maintain that some of the convention’s provisions are binding customary international law — including those justifying its December acquisition of an additional 1 million square kilometers of seabed. The U.S. stands out as one of just 28 countries, including Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, South Sudan and Syria, that have not ratified UNCLOS. This odd combination of America’s boycott of UNCLOS/ISA and its position that some UNCLOS provisions are binding customary international law contributes to geopolitical volatility, such as when the U.S. criticized China, which is a party to UNCLOS and ISA, for violating UNCLOS-based international law when it made territorial claims over seabed in the South China Sea.  

Regardless of how growing disputes over seabed claims are resolved, the deep seabeds beyond the claim of any country are of growing importance and conflict.  

For millennia, fishermen have known that valuable shellfish and other fish live on and under the deep seabed, and that the right to their harvest is vitally important. For over a century, the petroleum industry has extracted oil/natural gas, gradually moving further into deeper waters. The seabed already provides a large portion of the oil and gas that is consumed. Moreover, submarine oil/gas pipelines on and under the seabed — like the now-famous Nord Stream gas pipeline — transport a large share of the world’s gas and oil, while also being the subject of environmental concerns. 

Similarly, since the 1850s, deep seabeds have been the site of an array of undersea telegraph, telephone, video and data cables that have enabled international communications of every sort. The undersea cable industry today includes almost 600 fiber optic cables that carry almost all international data , including the Internet’s backbone. Until recently, the undersea cable industry was dominated by telegraph/telephone companies, but because of the enormous growth of the Internet, many new undersea cables today are owned by Internet businesses.  

As I have previously noted in this space, seabed mining presents the latest, and potentially the largest, seabed industry. Deep seabed manganese nodules, among other seabed mineral sources, offer enormous potential for nickel, cobalt, copper and other metals needed for the future green economy. Norway, for example, has already announced plans to begin deep seabed mining. 

Combined, these industries make the seabed central to the future world economy. As such, it is of great geopolitical and military interest, and thus a theater of conflict. Modern geopolitical use of the seabed began during WWI when the Central Powers were denied access to undersea cables by the Allies, thereby weakening the Central Powers. The modern military use of the seabed developed mostly for espionage during the Cold War; today, military and geopolitical positioning over control of the seabed is growing, perhaps most notably in the Pacific between the U.S. and China. 

The next decade will see increased conflicts over the seabed and greater recognition of its importance. Partly because it hasn’t ratified UNCLOS, the U.S. may not be prepared.  

Roger Cochetti has served as a senior executive with COMSAT, IBM, VeriSign and CompTIA. A former U.S. government official, he has helped found a number of nonprofits in the tech sector and is the author of textbooks on the history of satellite communications.