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I once heard, from a potentially unreliable source, an interesting story about this. When countries border each other and also share a coast there is a issue of
by crowf 6y ago
I once heard, from a potentially unreliable source, an interesting story about this. When countries border each other and also share a coast there is a issue of how to decide who owns the water. The simplest way is to find the point where the two countries and the coast meet. Then from there draw a line along the longitude. However, that is problematic, because there are countries like Libya and Egypt where their boarder is along the latitude.
During those times the British were very colonial, and one of their methods of keeping power was to cause the colonised people to fight amongst themselves (as can still be seen with the Indians and Pakistanis, Israelis and Palestinians). Well, they invented a method to split the coast by first finding the angle of tangent on the point of the boarder between the countries and the sea. Take 90 degrees of the tangent, and that is the sea boarder.
While this looks good upon first glance, due to the coastline paradox, you can always find a different tangent line. That then could be the cause of conflict between countries as they try to determine the sea boarder.
If anyone knows if there is any truth to the story, I would be interested in hearing.
- magicsmoke 6y agoBased on some reading online, maritime delimination of boundaries beyond a 3 mile "cannonshot" distance didn't become common until after the 1950s when treaties were drawn up that would become the precursor to UNCLOS. In those treaties, the starting point for border delimitation was the equidistant point between two countries' coastline. When two countries have adjacent coasts, this ends up roughly perpendicular, but it still works even if they have irregular coastlines and doesn't involve any angle measurements, just distance. Considering that ocean borders only became common after the age of British colonialism and that perpendicular baselines were never specified as the standard in UNCLOS, I'm inclined to say that this is a myth.
- crowf 6y agoThanks for fact checking. I guess I'll have to preface this story by saying that it's a myth. Oh well
- 082349872349872 6y ago"Let's you and him fight." In recent news, also greeks and turks, irish and ulster scots, ... Arguably the same strategy exists between those who take The Sun and those who take The Economist.
- growlist 6y agoIt's remarkable how all the woke stuff seemed to go to a different level very soon after Occupy Wall Street.
- umeshunni 6y agoThe linked Wiki page says this was also true of the Alaska - Canada border: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_boundary_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_boundary_dispute Alaska boundary dispute – Alaskan and Canadian claims to the Alaskan Panhandle differed greatly, based on competing interpretations of the ambiguous phrase setting the border at "a line parallel to the windings of the coast", applied to the fjord-dense region.