The Law of the Sea

Down in the deep, the legal distinction between land and sea no longer holds.

MAY 9, 2023

I write this essay in an office in Singapore, where I have just learned an arresting fact. The legal historians Antony Anghie and Kevin Tan have informed me that in the course of my arrival, via Terminal 3 of Singapore’s Changi Airport, I must have crossed – on foot – the probable spot where, more than 400 years ago, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) Captain Jacob van Heemskerk captured the Santa Catarina, a Portuguese ship. This makes sense: in Martine van Ittersum’s rich description of the incident, she notes that it took place at the entrance of the Singapore Straits. Heemskerk, the story goes, made a wild dash to Johor from Tioman Island upon receiving news that two Portuguese carracks laden with spices, silks, and porcelain, would be moving through the Straits. Having missed the first, he awoke on the morning of February 25, 1603, to find the second, the Catarina, right before his eyes. He swiftly captured the ship just off Singapore’s eastern shoals. In the time since that event, projects of reclamation have increased Singapore’s total land area by 25 percent, and Changi airport occupies one such reclaimed part, sitting where the shoals used to be.

 The Catarina’s capture occupies an important place in the history of international law. The incident was part of an imperial struggle between European states over access to trade with the East Indies. Such trade promised fabulous wealth: the goods recovered from this event alone sold for over three million guilders in the markets of Amsterdam, an amount that was roughly double the capital of the English East India Company. Portugal was outraged by the loss, while the VOC was keen to defend its actions. On retainer from the company, the jurist Hugo Grotius—then just in his early twenties!—wrote a brief that is now regarded as a foundational text,  Mare Liberum, or The Free Sea.  

Grotius argued that the sea was entirely unlike land. Land, being fixed, cultivable and, most importantly, exhausted by its use, could be regarded as divisible, subject to public and private ownership, and demarcated by national boundaries. The sea was fluid and constantly in movement; it was indivisible, unoccupiable, inexhaustible, indeed unalterable for better or worse via human activity. As such, it was irreducible to private ownership or state sovereignty. That being the case, it was Portugal that had acted wrongfully in claiming exclusive rights of maritime navigation and commerce with the Indies.

The Grotian imaginary of the sea persisted for centuries. The principle of the freedom of the seas came to define oceanic activities from navigation to fishing. Indeed, modern international law continues to express a principle of maritime freedom, though it is a far narrower form of freedom than Grotius initially claimed.

Today, international treaties, states, institutions, corporations, and courts all recognize that the ocean is divisible and, in parts even appropriable, in the same way as land. Oceanic resources are exhaustible and can also be enhanced by human endeavor: cultivation through new methods like aquaculture is increasingly seen as essential to assure the global supply of fish. In the decades since the Second World War, a dense network of legal rules on access, use-rights, and responsibilities have developed to regulate the crowding conglomerations of interests and territorial claims upon the oceans.

[Read: The Benthic Battlefield]

Moreover, international law has been increasingly called upon not only to articulate the ways land and sea resemble each other, but also to address the mutability of those very categories. Thanks to legal and technological innovations, what was once sea might become land: the reclamation projects that have accounted for the site of Changi Airport are but one example. In the other direction, rising sea levels and intensifying critical weather events can quickly turn what was once land into sea. Down in the deep, the binary between land and sea is confounded by formations which appear as neither fully one nor quite the other.

The shifting relation between land and sea reflects the scale of human impact on the environment. This unstable relation forces us to confront the consequences of climate change, as the fixed certainties — soil, resources, infrastructure – that have for so long governed our imagination of land begin to fall apart.  As a result, we must contend with new expectations of, and investments in, the sea.       

I.   Fragile Ports

A mid-19th century Englishman called Henry Piddington is said to have been “one of the first Cassandras of climate science.” Cassandra, you might recall, is a figure from Greek mythology: a Trojan priestess cursed to be disbelieved despite possessing the power to make accurate prophecies. Much the same was true of Piddington.

An amateur meteorologist in colonial Calcutta, Piddington raised early alarm about a project initiated by the British East India Company to construct a new port city on the banks of the Matla River in Bengal. This port would replace the older Calcutta port, which, although a major center for the Company’s shipping operations, lay further inward from the Bay of Bengal. Concerned about this project, in 1853, Piddington published a pamphlet addressed to the Governor-General of India. In it, Piddington warned that the planned new port would be far too exposed to a storm surge:

“[E]very one and everything must be prepared to see a day when, in the midst of the horrors of a hurricane, they will find a terrific mass of salt-water rolling in, or rising up upon them, with such rapidity that the whole settlement will be inundated to a depth from five to fifteen feet.”

The pamphlet went unheeded. The engineers constructing the new Port Canning took notice neither of Piddington’s warnings, nor of the local knowledge signified by the river’s very name: “matla” means “intoxicated” or “crazed” in Bengali. Piddington was of course proven right, although he did not live to see it. The new port, grandly inaugurated in 1864, was struck by a devastating cyclone three years later, and the port town was soon abandoned. The novelist Amitav Ghosh tells the story well in his novel, The Hungry Tide, and later in his lectures on climate change published as The Great Derangement. He tells it as a tale of hubris and of forgetting.

Forgetting, says Ghosh, has also been at work in settlements elsewhere: in Bombay (Mumbai) and New York, Hong Kong and Singapore, all built on fragile cusps of reclaimed land open to the ocean, unlike the sheltered older port cities of London, Lisbon, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Guangzhou, Malacca, Cochin, Dhaka and others; in the premiums attached to beachfront locations all over the globe; in the deliberate neglect of the tsunami warnings inscribed in medieval stone tablets placed along the Fukushima coast, which read, “Do not build your homes below this point!”

The possibility of total loss of territory raises unsettled legal questions. Will these populations become stateless, not for having lost their citizenships or nations, but rather the ground upon which they once stood?

Rising sea waters will flood all these great hubs of human life, impacting millions of people. The worst affected will be those who have settled there neither due to hubris nor forgetting, but because dispossessed of homes and livelihoods elsewhere. Some, among them many Bangladeshis and Syrians, already displaced by crises emanating from climate change, and building their new lives in conditions of increasing vulnerability, will be made climate refugees twice over. 

II. Sinking States

If mass displacement due to rising sea levels is the threat hanging over Asia’s millions, another kind of loss may be in store for their oceanic neighbors. Several Pacific Island states, among them Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands, the Republic of Kiribati, and the Solomon Islands, face the prospect of total extinction of their land areas. So do the Maldives and Seychelles in the Indian Ocean. Their low elevations make these states particularly vulnerable; several have already seen a significant percentage of their lands disappear under water.

The possibility of total loss of territory raises unsettled legal questions. Will these populations become stateless, not for having lost their citizenships or nations, but rather the ground upon which they once stood? International law dictates that certain criteria must be fulfilled for a state to come into existence; there must be, to use Judge James Crawford’s phrase, “a territorial community under government.” What, then, to make of islands that will no longer be able to support territorial communities because their “territory” has been claimed by the sea?

[Read: The Final Hours of the Costa Concordia]

Even as they prepare for the practical exigencies of dislocation, these threatened island states are understandably concerned about maintaining their independent sovereign status. Some have explored the option of acquiring new land. Kiribati did so in 2014, in a desperate and eye-catching measure after a World Bank-led adaptation program was perceived to achieve only doubtful success. While some program elements, like planting mangroves, proved useful, others were less so: new sea walls built out of sandbags had only caused more erosion. Thereafter, Kiribati paid out a sum of $8.77 million to the Church of England – which had expanded its reach to the Pacific Islands in the 19th century – to purchase 20 square kilometers of land on a Fijian island. According to former President Anote Tong of Kiribati, who oversaw the transaction, this area may one day become the new home for some of his state’s 110,000 people.

Yet while such purchases may confer ownership of property, they cannot confer sovereignty—that must be agreed with the ceding state. Such agreements are difficult to secure. The law professor Jane McAdam relates the previous experience of Nauru, which, having suffered massive environmental damage due to irresponsible phosphate mining under the trusteeship of Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom (later the subject of a proceeding brought by Nauru before the International Court of Justice) had sought resettlement on a new island. Australia, willing to offer Curtis Island—located at a distance of 3,000 kilometers—for the purpose, categorically refused to transfer sovereignty over it to Nauru.

International lawyers have responded to the unfair eventuality of territorial extinction with the suggestion of “freezing” the baselines, that is to say, permanently fixing the points from which the maritime claims of such states are measured. This practice would avoid the invocation of ambulating baselines, in which the starting points for the measurement of progress or retreat in response to the changing boundaries between land and sea. The approach aims to ensure that later decreases of land will have no effect on the resource entitlements of sinking states. Implied here is the adoption of a collective legal fiction, an unconscious mental stretching of the area of each such state to maintain an agreed upon square mileage.

This proposal, which is being explored by the International Law Commission, and is backed by several states, does not of course answer all difficulties: the people displaced by sea-level rise will still need new homes and enduring prospects of maintaining their political communities. But part of its elegance is its reversal of decades of cartographic practice, which has facilitated our common mental diminution of Pacific states’ significance.

III. Expanding Shelves

As you walk into the ocean, crossing the low-water baseline, the ground gently declines. If you walk out far enough—of course, by now, well underwater—you will reach a point where it suddenly falls away from your feet. This may be for many reasons: a shift in the sands, or you may be teetering at the edge of a canyon. Or you may have discovered for yourself the edge of the geological formation known as the continental shelf.

Some coasts, such as the Atlantic seaboard of the United States, have a broad continental shelf—gradually declining over a long distance—others, like the U.S.’s own Pacific seaboard, have narrow ones. Some shelves are relatively smooth; others are fissured and fractured by ridges and canyons. Continental shelves give on to a steeply falling continental slope, and then a gradually declining continental rise where the sliding sediments gather. Together, the three comprise the continental margin, distinct in composition from the abyssal plain: the floor of the deep ocean.

Until World War II, the continental shelf was largely governed by the principle of the freedom of the sea. But in 1945, following the discovery of petroleum deposits off its eastern coast, the U.S. issued the Truman Proclamation, asserting jurisdiction over the resources of the continental shelves which were “naturally appurtenant” to its coasts. It thereby set off a long process of ever-expanding claims. The initial U.S. claim, limited to the part of the shelf less than 100 fathoms underwater, comprehended territory only a few miles out into the ocean (but given its long coastlines, still a significant claim, obtaining, for “the price of printer’s ink,” effective sovereignty “over submerged lands equal in [total] area to the Louisiana Purchase”).

This limited claim, based on a criterion of water-depth, was overcome by two forces. The first was pressure from oil companies, which had developed the capability to extract oil in deeper waters and encouraged states to bring larger stretches of the shelf under national jurisdiction, so that they could offer corporations secure and exclusive tenure over drilling sites.

The second was pressure from states with narrow continental shelves (such as many Latin American countries), which rejected a depth criterion altogether. They argued instead for a distance criterion that would allow all states rights to equal widths of the seabed, regardless of whether the area incorporated included the continental slope, or rise, or even the abyssal plain.

The 1982 Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) reflects this position, designating 200 miles of the seabed as the “continental shelf” irrespective of actual physical structure. The Convention reminds us that geography is not irrelevant; merely, it is no longer inconvenient, for it does not determine the minimum claim.

We now rightly look to law for solutions to climate change, but we might also keep in mind that the problems we are asking it to address have been enabled by its own regimes.         

States can provide geological evidence of natural prolongation to claim the continental margin beyond 200 miles—up to an even more generous limit. The part of the seafloor which is qualified as the continental shelf is placed within the jurisdiction of states, and excluded from the remainder of the area designated as the common heritage of mankind (an area much in the news lately, in relation to the possible commencement of seabed mining).

In 2007, Russia planted its flag on the Arctic seafloor, staking exclusive claim to vast oil and gas deposits, on the basis that melting ice had revealed a longer continental shelf. Many reacted in tones of outrage or alarm.  The Canadian foreign minister stated, on television:

“This isn’t the 15th century. You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say: ‘We’re claiming this territory’.”

Of course, it was not 15th century practice, but rather 20th century international law that grounded Russia’s claim; it has since also brought this claim within the designated UNCLOS procedure. And it is the 20th century escalation in global warming caused by the extraction of fossil fuels that is melting the Arctic ice and bringing its hydrocarbons into view. We now rightly look to law for solutions to climate change, but we might also keep in mind that the problems we are asking it to address have been enabled by its own regimes.         

IV. Trash Isles

The ocean is today clotted with areas of concentrated plastic wastes that, released from all over the world, collect at ocean gyres. The Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans all have large swirling garbage patches, so-called “trash islands.” A recent study suggests that the size of the Pacific patch is about 1.6 million square kilometers, close to three times the size of France. The waste is not compacted into a solid body: a part of it is broken down into minute particles, though larger objects also abound; the garbage patches resemble ‘cloudy soup’—of enormous proportion (the study estimates a figure of 79,000 tons for the Pacific patch).

The environmental harms that result from all this plastic are hard to overestimate: 100,000 marine animals are killed or injured by plastics every year; marine animals mistake smaller pieces of plastic for food—harmful to them, and also contaminating to the food chain; larger plastics too disrupt the food chain by blocking sunlight from plankton and other autotrophs. Plastics also leach out toxic substances into the ocean.

Despite legal instruments such as the London Dumping Convention, the MARPOL Convention, the regional OSPAR Convention, it is difficult to pinpoint responsibility either for creating this mess or for cleaning it up. The plastic comes from everywhere, if more from some places than others, and it collects in areas beyond national jurisdiction. The enormous costs of any clean-up operation have deterred even states with strong environmental lobbies from taking action in the collective interest. And while there is now a new and long-awaited effort to develop a treaty on “plastic pollution, including in the marine environment,” it is too early to predict the contents of this treaty or responsibilities that states will be willing to assume.

Yet the need for international action could not be clearer. Recently, for example, some private actors have floated ocean-cleaning technologies. These might sound like an answer to prayer—but these technologies come with their own problems. Scientists have raised concerns about their efficiency and likely negative impacts on marine life. Speaking about one, the leading ocean science communicator Rebecca Helm warned that, “it could be a blood bath. The device will hit 0.8 to 40 billion small animals HOURLY.” Many lives are entangled in the plastic economy.

In September 2017, British media group LADbible and the Plastic Oceans Foundation started an unusual campaign, asking the United Nations to recognize the Pacific garbage patch as an independent country, named the Trash Isles. They designed a national flag, passport, currency and stamps, and encouraged people to register as citizens (nearly 250,000 people have signed up, including David Attenborough and Al Gore). The campaign website suggests that the Trash Isles could fulfill all legal criteria for statehood, including territory, people, government, and capacity to enter into relations with other states; and that legal recognition of its statehood will entitle the new country to demand cooperation for its clean up from other states.

 The arguments were satirical of course; a brilliant pin-pointing of the scale (country-sized!) and social embeddedness of the problem: if we don’t act now, sooner or later, we will all become involuntary citizens of trash islands.

V. Waterworlds

“Welcome to seavilization,” reads the website of The Seasteading Institute (TSI). Founded in 2008 by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Theil and Milton Friedman’s grandson Patri Friedman, TSI is raising investments for the creation of—what they hope will be—mini ocean-floating republics. They describe the aims of their project in terms of “making land” to ease the pressure on crowded urban centres; and fostering “societal innovation,” by liberating the residents of these republics from “obsolete” political systems (read: welfare and taxes).

TSI’s pilot project, announced in January 2017, was to be a floating city built in Polynesian waters, off the coast of Tahiti. The city was intended to be composed of several detachable housing units and to accommodate a few hundred people. TSI claimed that French Polynesia had agreed to grant autonomy to this city: its residents would choose their legal and political arrangements; Polynesian laws would not apply. This pilot would serve as a “proof-of-concept” and, in time, the ocean would be occupied by several such seasteads, that would be hubs for commerce and petri dishes for various experiments in social organization. In recent years, TSI has announced a clutch of other projects.

By TSI’s own estimation, seasteading is a visionary project. And indeed, there is a form of inventive genius at work in it. But in what does it consist? Not so much in TSI’s architectural plans, which after all recall older blueprints, such as those by Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao, or Kiyonori Kikutake. Not so much in the stupendous feats of engineering it requires, for we have already witnessed the construction of oil platforms, deep sea drilling ships, and artificial islands. Jacques Costeau (Conshelf) and the US Government (Sealab and Tektite), even built experimental structures for underwater living. Nor is TSI’s vision of autonomy—a rehearsal of libertarian ideas—a manifestation of inventive genius. Many less literal “off-shores” exist already to protect individuals and businesses from the reach of taxes, labor regulations, and various social and penal laws.

But the “freedom of the sea” is a legal institution, and private conduct is subject to national and international laws. These laws can be subverted, but they do not disappear merely because one moves a few miles offshore.

The journalist Hettie O’Brien has examined what may be the actual intent underlying TSI’s grand claims: changing on-shore U.S. tax policy by drawing attention to the threat of capital flight, as well as to alternative imaginations of freedom and government. It was also a play to claim Polynesian resources. Here is where we might concede TSI’s inventive genius: it recasts its luxury, resource-intensive construction projects as ways of adapting to climate change, and attempts to convert the idea of the free sea into the suggestion that on the ocean, unlike on land, anything goes.  

But the “freedom of the sea” is a legal institution, and private conduct is subject to national and international laws. These laws can be subverted, but they do not disappear merely because one moves a few miles offshore. Ironically, TSI’s initial plans have rested on the guarantee of waivers of territorial jurisdiction by host states, not upon any anterior liberty-granting property of the ocean. Such waivers may not be easily forthcoming in any case: a year after it concluded a deal with TSI, French Polynesia announced it would no longer proceed.             

VI. The Out-of-Sight Arteries of Globalization

The first transoceanic cable was laid in the mid-19th century, joining North America to Europe via Valentia Island in western Ireland, and the town of Heart’s Content in eastern Newfoundland, Canada. Laid by the Atlantic Telegraph Company, the cable commenced operations on August 16, 1858 with an exchange of greetings between Queen Victoria and U.S. President James Buchanan, and broke down three weeks later. Following the U.S. Civil War, the company—by then reconstituted as the Anglo-American Telegraph Company, following several mergers—tried again, and in 1866 succeeded in establishing a more durable connection. Since then, more than 55,0000 miles of submarine cables have come to connect all the regions of the world.

Today, a very few links—forty-five from the continental United States, less than five from many other countries—extending outwards (and downwards) from each state support the bulk of world’s phone-calls, emails, videos and other digital exchanges. Connected in a hub-and-spoke fashion, with many newer fiber-optic systems mapping onto older telegraph and telephone routes, the submarine cable network has joined lands across the ocean for over a century. In The Undersea Network, Nicole Starosielski offers the following corrections to our intuitive understandings of the global communications network:

“It is wired rather than wireless; semicentralized rather than distributed; territorially entrenched rather than deterritorialized; precarious rather than resilient; and rural and aquatic rather than urban.”

In Southeast Asia, the impact of cables preceded their presence; their distant use produced “a Victorian ecological disaster.” In the 19th and early 20th centuries, cable wires used to be wrapped in a naturally occurring latex called gutta percha to insulate them from seawater. This grew in the rainforests of (what were then) British Malaya and Sarawak, the Dutch East Indies, and French Indochina. By historian John Tully’s calculations, around 800,000 trees were felled to supply insulation for 1858 transatlantic cables. By the early 20th century, submarine cables had accounted for the destruction of approximately 88 million trees.

Present-day cables rely upon rare earth minerals. China provides 95 percent of the world’s supply of these minerals, which are also used in the manufacture of smartphones, computers and aircraft. Their production comes with extremely high environmental costs.

If distant environmental effects are part of the political ecology of submarine cables, so too are the—intensifying—uses of the oceans that pose direct threats to them. Cables are at risk of accidental damage from shipping, fishing, oil and gas extraction, and deep sea mining; as well as, crucially, damage that may be intentionally caused as an act of terror or war. They are at risk, furthermore, from the effects of climate change, such as alterations in temperature and currents, and extreme weather events. They may be put to covert uses such as espionage, or be tapped or hacked themselves. International law offers insufficient protections against all these threats. Cables lie at the fuzzy legal intersection of private (usually shared) ownership and (global) public interest, and the law—emphasizing the freedom to lay them—offers limited guidance on the rights and responsibilities that follow.

A current venture spearheaded by three international organizations might provide the catalyst for more comprehensive legal regulation. The International Telecommunications Union, UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, and the World Meteorological Organization are exploring the possibility of using the vast cable network for ocean climate monitoring and disaster warning. Scientists already use cables in marine research, but the telecommunications cable network could produce data at a much greater scale, thereby perhaps also compensating for their ecological costs. The venture has proceeded slowly, as many legal and practical hurdles arise.

VII. International Law and Deep Structures

Deep below the ocean surface, hydrothermal vents form at points on the ocean floor where the earth’s plates are moving apart. Mineral-rich soups of manganese, copper, iron, nickel, cobalt, gold, and silver gush out through the cracks and precipitate as sheets, mounds, or chimneys of great heights. These vents are also home to unique ecosystems that thrive on chemosynthesis rather than relying upon the photosynthetic food web that serves most other life on Earth, including us humans. Their organisms live in extreme conditions of pressure, temperature, and fetidness. For these very reasons, they are much sought now by biotech and pharmaceutical industries, even as the mining industry sets its sight on the mineral precipitates.

The complexity of hydrothermal vents was discovered only in the late 1970s. The scientists who led the first cruise to study a vent system in the Galapagos Rift in 1977 have spoken of their astonishment and lack of preparation to deal with what they found. The cruise had brought along neither a biologist nor any kinds of preservatives, and the crew had to donate their own stocks of vodka to allow samples to be carried home.

Of course, subsequent scientific cruises returned well prepared, and their discoveries have reshaped our understanding of the ocean floor. They have also set off exciting new speculations about whether vents might be the answer to the perennial question of how life began on Earth. The “Lost City” vent system of the mid-Atlantic ridge  offers “a contemporary analogue of conditions where life may have originated,” and is on UNESCO’s list for the award of World Heritage status.

Vents were discovered too late for attention in the 1982 UNCLOS, which does not directly mention them. Indeed, their relatively recent discovery was fortuitous for the authors of the treaty, which relies upon neat binary classifications between land and water, life and matter, and mobility and immobility. The UNCLOS provisions sort the ocean and its contents into discrete economic regimes: seabed minerals, for example, designated as “the common heritage of mankind” are placed under the regulatory jurisdiction of the International Seabed Authority (ISA); while marine life is governed by the principle of freedom, qualified by regional fisheries management frameworks, and, soon, a newly negotiated Agreement on Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ).  

However, vents are, by nature, resistant to such classifications: they are sites where solid and liquid mediums mix and merge in a dynamic way, where matter and life are not only imbricated but also where matter quickens into life, and where fixity and mobility are meaningless distinctions in the absence of better knowledge of the many exchanges—from genomic to macrolevel—that take place within and between vent communities. The resolute liminality of vents raises major questions for how they will be addressed by the multiple regimes that are applicable to them, from seabed mining (ISA) to genetic resources gathering (BBNJ).

The multiplicity of applicable laws might seem reassuring; after all, you might say, here is one site in the ocean where the law is not absent; in fact, like life, it is complex and abundant; the regimes have scrambled to address vents in specific terms, and, possibly, they might work to strengthen each other to offer better protection to ecosystems that are implicated.

Vents have brought back basic questions of ontology and epistemology: What is the ocean? How do we know it? In whose interests is it used? Where do land and sea meet and part? Who has freedom on the sea, and for whom has it been a location of extraction, immiseration and constraint?

But it is an important aspect of the resolute liminality of vents that, in straining the simple classifications of UNCLOS, they throw into relief the extractive imaginary of the ocean that was enabled via those classifications. Against new scientific and ecological knowledge of the ocean’s vast and connected ecosystems, and linkage to planetary biogeochemical cycles, these classifications rendered a simple, divisible ocean. Now, the regimes scrambling to address vents are doing so precisely because vents lie at the intersections of multiple resource exploitation interests; they seek to smooth away any collisions of interests that hinder the business of exploitation.

The literature about the law of the sea often assumes that the fundamental opposition is between “freedom” and “enclosure”—between mare liberum and mare clausum—and thus, for example, between high seas and common heritage of mankind regimes, or areas within and beyond national jurisdiction. Yet those distinctions all serve the same, longstanding paradigm: the ocean as a vast resource base for capital accumulation, concentrating benefits in a few hands against a distribution of vast costs—including ecological and humanitarian costs—to many. In this sense, although it is considered to be the “new law of the sea,” UNCLOS reenacted older logics. It is not surprising or accidental that concerns now arise about the ISA’s determination to plough ahead with seabed mining, the attritive battles over benefit-sharing, the coagulation of plastics in ocean gyres, the under-regulation of submarine cables, the depletion of marine fisheries; or the geopolitics over continental shelf claims—these were all entirely predictable (and predicted) emanations of deeper structural logics.

By the very confusions they introduce, vents offer a distinct opportunity to force open oceanic questions, to force the global conversation beyond pallid discussions about “sustainable development”, and beyond the enactment of simple fixes to allow exploitation to continue. Vents have brought back basic questions of ontology and epistemology: What is the ocean? How do we know it? In whose interests is it used? Where do land and sea meet and part? Who has freedom on the sea, and for whom has it been a location of extraction, immiseration and constraint? In this moment of climate crises that are changing everything, what opportunities might arise for world-remaking, if we dare to take these questions seriously?

This essay was originally published in Visualizing Climate and Loss, a project of the Joint Center for History and Economics at Harvard University. It has been edited and expanded.

IMAGE: “Indes IIe. Feuille.” 1770 Bonne Map of Southern India, Sri Lanka (Ceylon), the Maldives, and the Indian Ocean