The continental shelf of the United States is the total of the continental shelves adjacent to the United States. In marine geology, it is the elevated seabed near US coasts; in the political sense, it is the area claimed by the United States as sovereign, according to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. [1]
The continental shelf of the United States serves as the limit of United States sovereign power, when not demarcated by an actual land border. Due to the fact that "The coastal State exercises over the continental shelf sovereign rights," [2] the continental shelf serves as the territorial sea of the United States, and as such, is claimed by the United States. [1] [3]
The seabed claimed by the United States is claimed as continental shelf due to a combination of qualifications offered by article 76 [2] in the UN convention. These qualifications most notably include paragraph 4(b), paragraph 5, and paragraph 7, all in article 76, according to a report published in 2023. [4] All new claims made by the United States follow these qualifications, along with all previously existing claims by the United States. [4] The United States claims that they have mapped these regions since 2003 to determine the worthiness of these claims. [4] The data collected from these surveys is publicly available on the US State Department website. [5]
While a some of the borders claimed by the United States are pursuant to existing treaties, most notably with Mexico [6] and Russia, [7] many new claims overlap with existing claims of other countries.
In the Arctic, Atlantic, and Mariana Islands regions, new American claims overlap with claims made by the Bahamas, Canada, and Japan. In the Arctic and Atlantic regions, both the Bahamas and Canada signaled willingness to negotiate boundary claims following the release of the 2023 report. [4] However, the US-Japanese maritime border near the Mariana Islands has been disputed since a 1993 report, [8] and Japan has not signaled willingness to negotiate or accept US proposals over the shared border, according to the 2023 report. [4]
The continental shelf of the United States is one of the largest examples of marine geology in the world, with thousands of miles of submarine land making up the various shelves of the collective. Each different shelf features different extents of continental shelves, from the long, elevated shelves of Alaska, to the short shelf of the Pacific Coast. [4] Bathymetric data collected by the United States [5] reveals the peculiarities of the different shelves.
Alaska features some of the most prominent continental shelves in the world, extending over 400 nautical miles from the tip of Alaska, near Utqiagvik. At a depth of less than 200 meters, the Chukchi Shelf is the preeminent shelf in the arctic, barely engulfed by the Arctic Ocean. This shelf has been intensively studied for its mineral resources, most notably crude oil. As of January 2004, more than 10 billion barrels of oil had been produced from the shelf, all from the Prudhoe Bay Oil Field, according to a British Petroleum report from 2006. [9] The rest of the northern shelf is made up of the Chukchi Plateau, or the Chukchi Borderlands, as referred to in the 2023 Extended Continental Shelf document. [4] These borderlands, while more broken up and slightly deeper, are claimed to be in accordance to all six qualification measured by the United States in the survey. [4] This area is important due to is purported rich natural resources, especially oil and manganese, [10] although no resources have been proven.
In the Bering Sea, the large Bering Shelf dominates the area, stretching over 300 nautical miles from southwest mainland Alaska, at a depth of around 500 metres. [4] The shelf features the large and sparsely populated Nunivak Island, the eight largest island in the United States. [11] The Alaskan Peninsula and Aleutian Islands extend from the south edge of the Bering Shelf, and the submarine Aleutian Ridge extends all the way to Attu Island, [4] over 1000 miles from mainland Alaska. [12] Bowers Ridge, located along the Aleutian Ridge and jutting northwest 200 nautical miles from Semisopochnoi Island, forms the last major feature of the Bering Sea continental shelf. [4] Both the Aleutian Ridge and Bowers Ridge were formed by volcanic activity drifting due to the movement of the Pacific tectonic plate. [13]
The Bering Sea is a marginal sea of the Northern Pacific Ocean. It forms, along with the Bering Strait, the divide between the two largest landmasses on Earth: Eurasia and the Americas. It comprises a deep water basin, which then rises through a narrow slope into the shallower water above the continental shelves. The Bering Sea is named after Vitus Bering, a Danish navigator in Russian service, who, in 1728, was the first European to systematically explore it, sailing from the Pacific Ocean northward to the Arctic Ocean.
Kiska is one of the Rat Islands, a group of the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. It is about 22 miles (35 km) long and varies in width from 1.5 to 6 miles. It is part of Aleutian Islands Wilderness and as such, special permission is required to visit it. The island has no permanent population.
The Chukchi Sea, sometimes referred to as the Chuuk Sea, Chukotsk Sea or the Sea of Chukotsk, is a marginal sea of the Arctic Ocean. It is bounded on the west by the Long Strait, off Wrangel Island, and in the east by Point Barrow, Alaska, beyond which lies the Beaufort Sea. The Bering Strait forms its southernmost limit and connects it to the Bering Sea and the Pacific Ocean. The principal port on the Chukchi Sea is Uelen in Russia. The International Date Line crosses the Chukchi Sea from northwest to southeast. It is displaced eastwards to avoid Wrangel Island as well as the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug on the Russian mainland.
The Commander Islands, Komandorski Islands, or Komandorskie Islands are a series of islands in the Russian Far East, a part of the Aleutian Islands, located about 175 km (109 mi) east of the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Bering Sea. Treeless and sparsely populated, the islands consist of Bering Island, Medny Island and fifteen islets and rocks. The largest of the latter are Tufted Puffin Rock (Kamen Toporkov or Ostrov Toporkov), 15 ha, and Kamen Ariy, which are between 3 km (1.9 mi) and 13 km (8.1 mi) west of the only settlement, Nikolskoye. Administratively, the Commanders compose the Aleutsky District of the Kamchatka Krai in Russia.
Exploration for petroleum in the Arctic is expensive and challenging both technically and logistically. In the offshore, sea ice can be a major factor. There have been many discoveries of oil and gas in the several Arctic basins that have seen extensive exploration over past decades but distance from existing infrastructure has often deterred development. Development and production operations in the Arctic offshore as a result of exploration have been limited, with the exception of the Barents and Norwegian seas. In Alaska, exploration subsequent to the discovery of the Prudhoe Bay oilfield has focussed on the onshore and shallow coastal waters.
Alaska occupies the northwestern portion of the North American continent and is bordered only by Canada on the east. It is one of two U.S. states not bordered by another state; Hawaii is the other. Alaska has more ocean coastline than all of the other U.S. states combined. About 500 miles (800 km) of Canadian territory consisting of British Columbia separate Alaska from Washington U.S. state. Alaska is thus an exclave of the United States that is part of the continental U.S. and the U.S. West Coast, but is not part of the contiguous U.S.
The Arctic consists of land, internal waters, territorial seas, exclusive economic zones (EEZs) and international waters above the Arctic Circle. All land, internal waters, territorial seas and EEZs in the Arctic are under the jurisdiction of one of the eight Arctic coastal states: Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the United States. International law regulates this area as with other portions of Earth.
The continental shelf of Russia or the Russian continental shelf is the continental shelf adjacent to the Russian Federation. Geologically, the extent of the shelf is defined as the entirety of the continental shelves adjacent to Russia's coasts. In international law, however, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea more narrowly defines the extent of the shelf as the seabed and subsoil of the submarine areas over which a state exercises sovereign rights.
The Russia–United States maritime boundary was established by the June 1, 1990 USA/USSR Maritime Boundary Agreement. The United States Senate gave its advice and consent to ratification as early as on September 16, 1991, but it has yet to be approved by the Russian State Duma. This delimitation line is also known as the Baker-Shevardnadze line or Baker-Shevardnadze agreement, after the officials who signed the deal, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union Eduard Shevardnadze and U.S. Secretary of State James Baker. The 1990 Agreement has been provisionally applied by the two countries since its date of signature. U.S. Department of State, The Outer Limits of the Extended Continental Shelf of the United States of America. Washington 2023, Executive Summary p 19.
The Amerasia Basin, or Amerasian Basin, is one of the two major basins from which the Arctic Ocean can be subdivided. The triangular-shaped Amerasia Basin broadly extends from the Canadian Arctic Islands to the East Siberian Sea, and from Alaska to the Lomonosov Ridge. The basin can be further subdivided based on bathymetric features; these include the Canada Basin, the Makarov Basin, the Podvodnikov Basin, the Alpha-Mendeleev Ridge, and the Chukchi Plateau.
The Arctic realm is one of the planet's twelve marine realms, as designated by the WWF and Nature Conservancy. It includes the coastal regions and continental shelves of the Arctic Ocean and adjacent seas, including the Arctic Archipelago, Hudson Bay, and the Labrador Sea of northern Canada, the seas surrounding Greenland, the northern and eastern coasts of Iceland, and the eastern Bering Sea.
The Chukchi Shelf or Chukchi Sea Shelf is the westernmost part of the continental shelf of the United States and the easternmost part of the continental shelf of Russia. In the west it merges with the Russian Siberian Shelf. Within this shelf, the 50-mile Chukchi Corridor acts as a passageway for one of the largest marine mammal migrations in the world.
Mikhail Nikolayevich Vasilyev was a Russian explorer and vice admiral of the Imperial Russian Navy. He is reputed for having surveyed the then little-known coast of Alaska as navigator. Vasiliev was sent by the Russian Imperial Hydrographic Service in 1819 to explore the northern parts of the Pacific Ocean and particularly the area around the Bering Strait. Certain geographic features of the Alaskan coast, like the Lindenberg Peninsula and Sealion Island were named by him in the maps that were subsequently published.
The Arctic Ocean is the smallest and shallowest of the world's five oceanic divisions. It spans an area of approximately 14,060,000 km2 (5,430,000 sq mi) and is known as one of the coldest of oceans. The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) recognizes it as an ocean, although some oceanographers call it the Arctic Mediterranean Sea. It has also been described as an estuary of the Atlantic Ocean. It is also seen as the northernmost part of the all-encompassing world ocean.
USC&GS Yukon was a schooner that served as a survey ship from 1878 to 1894 in the United States Coast Survey, which was renamed the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey in 1878. She was the pioneering Coast Survey or Coast and Geodetic Survey ship in many of the waters of the Territory of Alaska, including the Bering Sea and the western Aleutian Islands, and she also operated extensively in California and Washington. She later entered commercial service as Elwood and was wrecked in 1895.
The Aleutian Islands —also called the Aleut Islands, Aleutic Islands, or, before 1867, the Catherine Archipelago—are a chain of 14 main, larger volcanic islands and 55 smaller ones. Most of the Aleutian Islands belong to the U.S. state of Alaska, with the archipelago encompassing the Aleutians West Census Area and the Aleutians East Borough. The Commander Islands, located further to the west, belong to the Russian federal subject of Kamchatka Krai, of the Russian Far East. The islands form part of the Aleutian Arc of the Northern Pacific Ocean, and occupy a land area of 6,821 sq mi (17,666 km2) that extends westward roughly 1,200 mi (1,900 km) from the Alaskan Peninsula mainland, in the direction of the Kamchatka Peninsula; the archipelago acts as a border between the Bering Sea to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the south. Crossing longitude 180°, at which point east and west longitude end, the archipelago contains both the westernmost and easternmost parts of the United States, by longitude. The westernmost U.S. island, in real terms, however, is Attu Island, east of which runs the International Date Line.
Arctic cooperation and politics are partially coordinated via the Arctic Council, composed of the eight Arctic states: the United States, Canada, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, and Denmark with Greenland and the Faroe Islands. The dominant governmental power in Arctic policy resides within the executive offices, legislative bodies, and implementing agencies of the eight Arctic countries, and to a lesser extent other countries, such as United Kingdom, Germany, European Union and China. NGOs and academia play a large part in Arctic policy. Also important are intergovernmental bodies such as the United Nations and NATO.
The Arctic policy of Russia is the domestic and foreign policy of the Russian Federation with respect to the Russian region of the Arctic. The Russian region of the Arctic is defined in the "Russian Arctic Policy" as all Russian possessions located north of the Arctic Circle. Approximately one-fifth of Russia's landmass is north of the Arctic Circle. Russia is one of five littoral states bordering the Arctic Ocean. As of 2010, out of 4 million inhabitants of the Arctic, roughly 2 million lived in arctic Russia, making it the largest arctic country by population. However, in recent years Russia's Arctic population has been declining at an excessive rate.
The Chukchi Plateau or Chukchi Cap is a large subsea formation extending north from the Alaskan margin into the Arctic Ocean. The ridge is normally covered by ice year-round, and reaches an approximate bathymetric prominence of 3,400 m with its highest point at 246 m below sea level. As a subsea ridge extending from the continental shelf of the United States north of Alaska, the Chukchi Plateau is an important feature in maritime law of the Arctic Ocean and has been the subject of significant geographic research. The ridge has been extensively mapped by the USCGC Healy, and by the Canadian icebreaker CCGS Louis S. St-Laurent in 2011 and RV Marcus Langseth, a National Science Foundation vessel operated by the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.
Smith Bay is an estuary in the Beaufort Sea that supports a wide range of fish, birds, and marine mammals. It is located northeast of Point Barrow, Alaska. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management recognizes the southeastern portion of Barrow Canyon, which covers some, but not all, of Smith Bay, as an Environmentally Important Area.