How tiny Kiribati controls more seabed than China
Ocean politics creates a surprising playing field for seabed mining, thanks to three letters: E, E, Z.
Japan contains more than 14,000 islands. One of them is Minamitorishima, population: 0. It’s a puny one square mile and perhaps best known for its bird poop, among those who know it at all.
But the facts on paper bely Japan’s hope that this South Pacific speck could unlock centuries of resource independence for the island nation. Minamitorishima is a remarkable example of how the quirks of ocean politics—the delineation of Exclusive Economic Zones, in particular—can sway the fates of national economies.
(I’ll get to Kiribati and China by the end of this, I promise.)
Feathers and feces
That Minamitorishima belongs to Japan is something of a historical accident.
In 1889, an American entrepreneur named Rosehill tried to claim Minamitorishima for the United States. The island was uninhabited by people but had thousands of resident seabirds. Rosehill planned to harvest their guano (read: poop) for fertilizer.
But before Rosehill could return to the island to set up his feces-to-farm operation, Japan dispatched a group of colonists to Minamitorishima. They were less interested in poop than plumage. At the time, exotic feathers were fashionable millinery adornments. So the Japanese began slaughtering Minamitorishima’s albatross population to feather the caps of high-society women around the world.
Rosehill was pissed. He pressed the U.S. military to “oust” the Japanese from Minamitorishima. But after a brief naval confrontation, the U.S. stood down. They weren’t about to fight a war over bird poop (though it would not have been the first such war).
After some back-and-forth around World War II, tiny Minamitorishima remains in Japan’s hands today. It’s got a weather station and not much more.
Here’s where seabed mining comes in: Because Japan happens to control this one-square-mile dot in the Pacific Ocean, it also controls the seabed minerals in a more than 100,000-square-mile swath of ocean surrounding it.
The almighty EEZ
The 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea gave coastal nations the exclusive right to exploit maritime resources within 200 nautical miles of their own shores. That area was dubbed the Exclusive Economic Zone, or EEZ.
Countries can regulate seabed mining in their own EEZ’s without input from the international community. Papua New Guinea, Norway, and The Cook Islands are among the nations that have greenlit mineral exploration in their EEZ’s.
And thanks to Minamitorishima, Japan may move to do the same.
In 2018, researchers discovered high concentrations of rare-earth elements in the sediments of Japan’s EEZ near Minamitorishima. In theory, the trove is big enough to supply Japan for more than a century (at least for a subset of the 17 rare-earths). That could allow the country to break its reliance on China for rare-earth elements, which are critical in the energy and defense sectors.
Japan is already testing out equipment to extract the rare-earth-rich sediment.
Thanks to the EEZ system, the tiniest spit of land can herald a massive tract of mineral access on the seabed. In the most extreme examples, countries made up of widely dispersed islands can have EEZs thousands of times larger than their land area.
Take Kiribati. The South Pacific nation contains 33 islands spread across about 2,400 miles of ocean. It’s a quarter the size of Rhode Island but has an EEZ twice the size of Alaska.
Kiribati’s EEZ is about four times larger than that of China, a geopolitical giant with lofty seabed mining ambitions a land area of 3,700,000 square miles (compared to Kiribati’s 313 square miles).
All this is to say: Ocean politics is weird. The vagaries of the EEZ system mean small countries may be endowed with vast resources. And those countries alone decide whether and how to proceed with mineral extraction. So if you’re following seabed mining news, you have to keep an eye not just on the CCZ but on all those EEZ’s too.