THE OCEANS: Wild West Scramble for Control

Think of it: through the alchemy of imagination, the oceans disappear. Suddenly, the world would gain some 140 million sq. mi. of land, including mountains higher than Everest, volcanoes more powerful than Etna, chasms deeper than the Grand Canyon. By far the most pleasant scenery to man's eye—assuming anyone could survive in a world without water—would be the delicately terraced hills and snug valleys on the gently sloping continental shelves. The rest of the ocean floor would be mostly a vast wasteland of muddy ooze, as bleak in its way as the Sahara.

For the first time in history, man is looking at the oceans that cover two-thirds of the planet's surface in almost this way—as real estate. It is a momentous change, the start of a third great era in man's long relationship with the sustaining seas.

At first they were merely a source of fear, fascination and fish. Then, when the Phoenicians ranged over the Mediterranean in their graceful golahs about 3,300 years ago, the oceans also became a highway over which to carry national power and culture as well as trade. The story of civilization, in fact, is largely the story of bold seafaring peoples that quested for ever-farther shores. Athenians, Romans, Polynesians, Chinese, Iberians, French, English—all saw the ocean as a wilderness and a challenge.

Now the sea frontier seems tamed. The age of exploitation has begun.

Today's technology has unlocked the sea depths, opening a new store of treasures. Oilmen can locate oil, drill and cap wells under the enormous pressures of 700 ft. of water. Mining companies know how to sweep minerals off the cold, abyssal plains 20,000 ft. down.

Fishermen in modern, mechanized trawlers can easily draw bottom fish off the ocean floor with a kind of vacuum cleaner or haul in whole finny schools in a single huge seine net. Industrialized nations, like runners poised in their starting blocks, are awaiting only one thing before the race for the sea resources begins in earnest. They have to know who has legal title to all that wealth.

The answer is being hammered out in, of all places, the mountain city of Caracas, site of the United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea. Actually, the high and dry location makes a good deal of symbolic sense. The 5,000 delegates and official observers at the conference come from 149 nations—29 of them landlocked states without so much as a saltwater swimming hole.

Virtually every government on earth is represented at Caracas. The only country the U.N. did not invite was Taiwan (so that China would agree to come), and the only one that refused to participate was North Viet Nam (which was peeved because the Viet Cong were not asked to attend). The stated purpose of the Caracas meeting seems unremarkable enough: to update ocean law to accommodate advancing technology. But what has really drawn delegates from all over the world to Caracas is the biggest land (or water) grab in history.