118 



meter contour. This could well be the margin of the country at any 

 given time. Ten thousands years ago the coast line of the country was 

 in fact out here. The mineral value of the submerged shelf is very 

 much comparable to that of the land adjacent to it. 



The land inside the shore — that is, on the landward side — has al- 

 ready yielded about $80 billion of mineral products. So far the land 

 offshore has yielded about $7 billion. We can make an estimate, then, 

 of the mineral potential of the shelf and slope by comparing it with 

 the adjoining land areas. 



I said the area of the county is around 3,600,000 square miles. We 

 produce — in the United States — about $20 billion worth of mineral 

 products annually. This gives us a production of something in the 

 neighborhood of $5,500 per square mile per year in the Continental 

 United States. If we took that same figure and applied it to the 1,300,- 

 000 square miles of the continental shelf, it would mean that we have 

 a potential production from the continental shelves of the United 

 States of about seven and a half billion dollars a year. 



At the present time, we produce about $1.3 billion a j'ear from the 

 continental shelf and slope. So it means at the present time we are 

 only realizing about one-sixth the potential of the continental shelves. 



The principal mineral commodities that we take from the Conti- 

 nental Slielf and slope are oil, gas, and sulfur. These are recov^ered 

 from drill holes rather than by actual underground mining, and it is 

 perfectly feasible to extract from depths of the water of several hun- 

 dred feet. 



The only other mineral commodities tliat we take from the shelf 

 and slope are prosaic things such as sand and gravel for construction 

 and shells for concrete. 



Elsewhere in the world there is a very substantial production of 

 diamonds, tin, gold, and some other materials, from the marine realm. 

 But most of this is from depths that are not in excess of a few hundred 

 feet. 



We do, then, have a vei*y large mineral potential which we can be 

 fairly sure of and can appraise fairly well on the continental shelf 

 and slopes. Just to give some idea of the areas that I am speaking of, 

 we are assuming the shelf in general goes out to about 200 meters in 

 depth, the slope out to perhaps 2,000 meters in depth. 



The oceanic depths, the areas beyond the continental slope, in gen- 

 eral will be at depths greater than 5,000 feet. These are areas of intense 

 interest to those of us who are engaged in the study of mineral 

 resources. In actual fact we know very little about it. That is perhaps 

 one of the reasons why we are so interested in them. This is a wholly 

 different kind of terrain. It is one that we are not familiar with in our 

 work on the continents. 



There may well be — in this oceanic area — wholly different kinds of 

 mineral deposits, types w^e know nothing about at the present time. 



At the present time, we are in a period of perfectly fantastic devel- 

 opments of concepts of the geology of the oceanic basins. The geology 

 of the oceanic basin is incredibly different than that of the continent. 

 We expect the mineral deposits — if there are any there — will turn out 

 to be quite different, too. 



We know quite a little bit about a few things in the deep ocean, the 

 well-publicized manganese nodules, for example. These represent a 



