‘Scramble for the oceans’ Countries race to name and claim the remote seabed

“The sea does not belong to despots,” Jules Verne wrote in 1869 in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

- Donna Ferguson

“Upon its surface men can still exercise unjust laws, fight, tear one another to pieces, and be carried away with terrestrial horrors. But at 30 feet below its level, their reign ceases, their influence is quenched, and their power disappears.”

Now, more than 150 years later, geopolitics experts are warning that Verne’s final sentiment - expressed via the character of Captain Nemo - was wrong. From seabeds and sea caves to sea canyons, underwater ridges, seamounts, sea knolls and reefs, academics say countries are using the politics of nationalism to permanently stamp their mark on the topography of the ocean.

Klaus Dodds, professor of geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London, says countries are engaged in a “scramble for the oceans”.

“There’s more and more ocean grabbing going on in the world, because countries have been given legal permission to do that.”

Dr Sergei Basik, a geographer at Conestoga College in Ontario, Canada, says a relatively recent process of 3D mapping the ocean floor has allowed nations to assert their sovereignty over newfound undersea features, known as “bathyonyms”.

Just as in 1492, when a new map of the ocean inspired and emboldened Christopher Columbus to set sail across the world to find a new trade route to Asia, leading to the colonisation of America, the once murky abyss of the ocean has now resolved into clearly defined topographical features on a 3D map. All of these require a name - and nation states hungry for valuable natural resources and territory are staking symbolic claims on their “discoveries”.