L.

In fact, I believe the Durham chart provides too much of the wrong category of information. Better would be a simply bathymetric chart showing the bottom of the continental rise overlaid by the 350 nm boundary. There would still be two areas (the Chukchi Cap north of Alaska and the Lomonosov Ridge between Russian and Green;and and Canada) where claims may extend beyond 350 nm, but such a chart would be more clear and more useful than the Durham chart, at least for me to use in explaining the intricacies of Article 76 of the Law of the Sea Convention.

There is also a technical error in the explanation of the continental shelf as used in the legal determination of national claims. While a geologist would say that the continental shelf ends when the slopes begins its descent to the deep ocean floor, the definition used in the Law of the Sea Convention redefines the term “continental shelf” to include the geological shelf plus the continental slope (the long path to the bottom) and the continental rise (the final area before the deep ocean floor). In the arctic, the slope and rise add a significant amount of territory to the authority of the coastal state, not just for Russia, but for the US and Canada as well.