The US Is Claiming One Million Square Kilometers Of New Land
An area the size of California
In December of 2023, the United States quietly moved ahead with something called the Extended Continental Shelf Project (ECS). The State Department announced the creation of special ECS zones around the world, to which the United States is laying claim. These claims count specific seabeds as sovereign territories of the United States, opening them up to access, conservation, and exploitation.
Extended Continental Shelves are seabeds that are connected to contiguous land owned by the United States. The thinking goes that since the land is continuous, extending from owned land, it is still owned by the United States even though it lies at the bottom of the ocean. For example, while Guam is an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the land itself extends below the waves to the bottom of the ocean. Guam is simply the visible and exposed part of the land that lies above the water. But the rest of the land is still a part of the United States. Defining these areas gives the United States legal claim to the land that lies under the ocean that is connected to other sovereign US territories.
The land claims pertain only to the seabed and not the water column above it. The water above the ECS areas is governed by Economic Exclusion Zone (EEZ)…
