56 FRONTIERS IN OCEANIC RESEARCH 



The Chairman. Are there any questions? I am not going down 

 the line, but does any member have a question ? 



Mr. Wolf. 



Mr. Wolf. Has there been any international study made on the 

 possibility of developing the mineral and oil rights below the sea? 



Who has jurisdiction and so on? Or is it a first-come-first-served 

 basis? 



Dr. Wakelin. I am not sure I can answer that, Mr. Wolf. We can 

 supply that for the record. 



Mr. Wolf. That is all right. It doesn't have to be answered at this 

 point. 



Dr. Wakelin. Would you like that supplied for the record ? 



Mr. Wolf. That will be satisfactory. 



(The information requested is as follows :) 



(a) There has been an international convention declaratory of international 

 law in which it is recognized that the coastal state is entitled to construct and 

 maintain or operate on the Continental Shelf installations and other devices 

 necessary for its exploration and exploitation of its natural resources (art. 5, 

 par. 2, Convention on the Continental Shelf) . 



(&) Jurisdiction over the Continental Shelf off the coast of the United States 

 for purposes of exploration control rests by statute with the Department of the 

 Interior, under terms of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act enacted on 

 August 7, 1953 (67 Stat. 462). Regulations controlling the operations and leas- 

 ing of these areas appear in the Code of Federal Regulations, 30 C.F.R. 250.1 

 and 43 C.F.R. 201.1. 



(c) Article 5, paragraph 8 of the Continental Shelf Convention provides that 

 "consent of the coastal state shall be obtained in respect of any research con- 

 cerning the Continental Shelf and undertaken there." A l'eview of records avail- 

 able in the Department of the Navy, as well as a review by representatives of 

 State and Interior Departments, has revealed no international studies having 

 been made to date under this provision of this convention concerning develop- 

 ment of mineral and oil rights. The Legal Adviser's Office of the State De- 

 partment informs that there was a preparatory document No. 20, dated January 

 3, 1958 (preparatory to the 1958 Conference on the Law of the Sea), which was 

 prepared by Admiral Mouton of the Netherlands, at the request of the Secretary 

 General of the United Nations. The title of the document is "Recent Develop- 

 ments in the Technology of Exploiting the Mineral Resources of the Continental 

 Shelf." The foregoing was apparently an individual effort by Admiral Mouton 

 rather than an "international study" by any group of representatives of the 

 community of nations. This document was not published. 



Mr. Miller. At the third conference of the sea, there was recogni- 

 tion of the right of the people adjacent to the Continental Shelf, 

 adjacent to the country, to have the oil rights, or have rights to the 

 minerals, and that attached to the floor of the sea, but by contrast, in 

 the sea itself, the fisheries, or the life in the sea, are viewed as interna- 

 tional. That is in this last Conference on the Law of the Sea that Mr. 

 Van Pelt and I attended as observers for the Merchant Marine and 

 Fisheries Committee, what they tried to do was to limit this and we 

 took a terrible beating as we didn't get the limits we wanted. 



So we went back to the 3-mile limit, and it moans now a uniform 

 rule has been thrown out of the United Nations and every country 

 can determine its own limits and hold them against anyone else. So 

 if Ecuador wants to say it is going to go out 200 miles, the only way 

 we can conl rovert is to go to war with Ecuador. This is the bad thing 

 <lia( has taken place at this conference of the sea. 



This came out, a good deal of it was brought about by concern with 

 the Gulf of Mexico, as to who was going to own the oil wells. We can 

 prospect on the Continental Shelf, that is all. 



