Ownership 



325 



Figure 248. Annual production 

 of crude oil cumulated by years 

 for each of the major offshore 

 oil fields. Data from California 

 State Lands Commission, Port 

 of Long Beach, City of Re- 

 dondo Beach, and Monterey 

 Oil Company. 



REDONDO BEACH 

 NEWPORT BEACH, 

 MONTALVO 

 SEAL BEACH- 

 ALAMITOS 

 RINCON 



1925 



1930 



1940 



1950 



30O 



20- 



1955 



Some idea of the value of the offshore oil 

 resources is given by the fact that the total 

 value of production to date is nearly a 

 billion dollars, and this is only from exten- 

 sions of known oil fields of the coastal area. 



Ovfnership 



For centuries international disputes have 

 arisen over fishing rights, shipping lanes, 

 and naval intrusions near national coasts. 

 By tacit understanding national control has 

 been assumed to a distance of 3 statute 

 miles from shore, the "hypothetical range of 

 an imaginary gun" in the late eighteenth 

 century, or simply a unit of 1 league 

 (Mouton, 1952, pp. 192-200). This distance 

 became meaningless for control of the sea in 

 1958 when missiles were fired thousands of 

 miles over the ocean and even into orbit 

 around the earth. Because no formal agree- 

 ments as to the seaward limits of nations 

 have been made, incidents have arisen 

 through occasional claims to greater dis- 

 tance from shore such as those since 1945 

 for fishing rights by Chile (to 200 nautical 

 miles), Ecuador, and Iceland in 1958, for 

 military purposes by Communist China in 

 1958, and for oil claims by several Middle 

 East countries. A compilation of many 

 such claims made before 1952 and of pro- 

 tests against them is given by Mouton 

 (1952), who says that ". . . an epidemic has 

 broken out, characterized by an insatiable 



thirst for salt water and a great gusto for 

 fish." 



In addition to basing territorial claims on 

 a particular distance from shore, considera- 

 tion has also been given to claims extending 

 to the edge of the continental shelf. Such is 

 reasonable in view of the fact that exploita- 

 tion of the sea floor beyond the range of 

 slant drilling is more limited by depth than 

 by distance from shore; for example, oil was 

 produced 50 miles (80 km) from shore in 

 the Gulf of Mexico in 1958. Legal defini- 

 tion of the true edge of the continental shelf, 

 however, raises many difficulties, owing to 

 the varied depth of the shelf-break from 

 place to place, to its commonly unsounded 

 nature, and to the question of classification 

 of shelf indentations such as submarine 

 canyons, troughs, depressions, and deep 

 basins (Mouton, 1952, pp. 6-32; Guilcher, 

 Kuenen, Shepard, and Zenkovitch, 1957). 

 It has even been suggested that the legal 

 problem of classification can be avoided by 

 redefining the continental shelf as extending 

 to a depth of 1000 fathoms (1829 meters); 

 however, not only does such a definition 

 conflict with geological and other scientific 

 considerations, but for southern Cahfornia 

 it would also leave spots of "no-man's sea" 

 within the shelf over the deep areas of Santa 

 Cruz, San Clemente, Velero, and other 

 basins. 



Since fishing and transportation are tran- 

 sient in nature, more complex questions are 

 brought up by mining at and below the sea 



