This represents some 385,000 square miles of seabed in the Pacific, Atlantic, Bering Sea and Arctic Ocean to an “extended continental shelf”. The majority is off the coast of Alaska ...

In January 2025, the Biden administration legally protected the North Bering Sea through a 1953 law called the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act. This law allows presidents to decide to ban ...

However in Antarctica, the right to an extended continental shelf under the UN Law of the Sea has to be considered against the provisions of the Antarctic Treaty, which suspends all territorial ...