Continental shelf

Continue defending our lawful maritime interests.

The 2016 Arbitral Award found that Aung and Chol forms part of the Philippine Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf.

Neither economic leverage nor military superiority can rewrite that finding.

Our leaders must explain the stakes honestly and distribute the burdens fairly.

He kind of nodded and smirked.

So I started explaining that we were learning about the Mid-Atlantic Shelf and the Mariana Trench, and very casually, almost like he was talking about the weather, he goes, you know, I was on the crew that charted the depths of those for the first time.

Then he follows it up with, do you think your teacher would be interested in some of my handwritten records and charts from those missions? And without really processing what he just offered me, I was just like, yeah, I'm sure my teacher would love that.

So I fly back to Southern California, I walk into my second period class, hand my teacher this stack of charts from my grandfather.

Mm-hmm.

So, uh, look, I, I mean, even later in my life, I remember being in, my, my favorite class in high school was marine bio, and we were learning about the Mid-Atlantic Shelf and the Mariana Trench.

And I went out to my grandfather's farm on spring break, and he was like, "What's your favorite subject?" And I was like, "Marine bio.

We're learning about this and this and this." And he was like, "Oh, I was part of the crew that helped chart those for the first time."

We, essentially they, they lost a nuclear submarine.

Mm-hmm.

And the, the mission that my grandfather was on when he made those charts of the Mid-Atlantic shelf, they were actually looking for a submarine that we had lost.

America had lost one of their submarines in the Atlantic.

Completely dry.

what had been a shallow sea became a river valley a deep canyon carved by the combined waters of the thames and the rhine cutting through the exposed continental shelf on their way to a north sea that had retreated hundreds of miles to the north and between Britain and Denmark, where fishing trawlers now drag nets through cold waters 30 to 40 metres deep, there was land.

Solid, dry, increasingly habitable land.

Doggerland was being born, not all at once.

The process took thousands of years, and it wasn't simple or straightforward.

As sea levels dropped, different parts of the continental shelf emerged at different times.

the highest areas ancient ridges and hills that had been just barely submerged during warmer periods these appeared first islands in a shrinking sea highlands surrounded by marshes and tidal flats then the lower area started emerging broad plains that had been sea-floor for millennia now exposed to air and sunlight for the first time in living memory well living memory for any species that had a memory that long the newly exposed land was raw fresh almost alien imagine being one of the first humans to walk on ground that had been ocean floor a few generations earlier the sediments would still be marine deposits shells and sand maybe the occasional fossil of ancient marine life there would be no soil yet no plants just bare substrate waiting to be colonized But colonization happened fast.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and evolution had spent billions of years perfecting species that could exploit new opportunities quickly.