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The doctrine arose only since the Truman Proclamation of September, 1945. 
It follows that where the land no longer dominates the sea, the continental 
shelf ends and beyond are maritime expanses appertaining to no one. No 
nation may validly purport to subject any part of them to its sovereignty. 
- (c) Boundaries of nations do not require precise definition and often, 
even as to land boundaries, are not precisely defined for long periods of 
time. This does not detract from their existence. 
(d) Neither the Conference of Plenipotentiaries which negotiated the 
Convention on the Continental Shelf in 1958, nor the International Law 
Commission which in 1956 drafted the concepts generally included therein 
(18), felt that either the practice of nations, knowledge of the resources 
and structure of the continental shelf, or methodology of profitable extract- 
tion of such resources was sufficiently clear to permit a useful definition of 
an outer boundary to the continental shelf that would be agreeable to the 
nations that was any more precise than “the adjacent land to the depth of 
200 meters or beyond that to where the depth of the superjacent waters 
admits of the harvesting of the natural resources of the said areas.” 
Knowledge of the seabed has advanced spectacularly in the ensuing decade 
and this is one of the most rapidly advancing fields of ocean research, but it is 
still highly fragmentary as respects the location of seabed resources that can 
be practically exploited. There is still no economic extraction of resources from 
the seabed where the depth of the water is much greater than 200 meters, and 
technology is not advancing those depths rapidly (this will be alluded to further 
below). As noted by the International Court of Justice in its decision on the 
North Sea Cases, the practice of nations in this field has not crystallized further 
than it was in 1958 to any marked degree. 
Accordingly there does not appear to be any strong reason in current human 
activity respecting the seabed that did not exist in 1958 which requires, or makes 
beneficial, any more precise definition of the outer boundary to the continental 
shelf than was given in 1958. 
There is no mad rush to colonize the deep-seabed. The claims in Latin America 
occurred before 1958, and are no more valid now than when made (19). As noted 
above, the International Court of Justice states that such rights as each nation 
holds in its continental shelf are inherent to it and do not require to be asserted 
by it to be valid. The obverse is equally true. 
4, The Wealth of the Seabed.—As normally happens with hoaxes if you have 
the forebearance and strength to wait out their original thrust, the stories of the 
billions of dollars of wealth to be had each year in the reasonably near future 
from the seabed outside national jurisdiction are now bouncing back to haunt the 
tellers as unbiased economists and experts bring in their testimony and this is 
evaluated by competent bodies, including the Economic and Technical Sub- 
Committee of the General Assembly Committee to Study the Peaceful Uses of the 
Seabed and the Ocean Floor beyond the Limits of National Jurisdiction. 
The truth is that there are no billions of dollars worth of annual profit (excess 
of value over cost) to be had from the very deep-seabed. 
There are great quantities of manganese nodules on the deep-seabed that con- 
tain other metals as well, such as cobalt, nickel, etc. There is no technology 
presently available by which they can be economically harvested and their com- 
ponent metals refined to sell in the market against the same metals from land 
deposits (20). This applies so far even to shallow, large deposits discovered in 
the Great Lakes area and the substantial deposits rather well known in moderate 
depths on the Blake Plateau. The one company actively working on developing 
the technology is investing some millions of dollars in doing so and does not 
anticipate the technology will be ready for full scale testing before the mid-1970’s. 
Neither it nor any other company is presently planning actual seabed mining 
activities for manganese nodules, although work is going on by several entities to 
delimit and classify deposits against the day the technology and markets are 
ready. 
In view of the massive geographic scale on which these nodules appear to be 
distributed, the major amount of capital that will be required to mine them when 
the technology is available, and the abundance of land sources of the metals, 
there is no evidence whatever that disputes among nations arising from conflicts 
hetween their citizens while mining the seabed for manganese nodules beyond 
national jurisdiction will perturb the international scene to a detectable degree 
within the lifetime of those worried about this problem. 
It is quite likely that there are petroleum deposits at several points under the 
deep seabed, Such as the Sigsbee Knolls of the Gulf of Mexico, north of the Cape 
