Fascinating world map includes countries’ ocean territory in their borders [5 pics]

While virtually every world map draws political borders around land masses, international law actually defines the first 200 nautical miles off the coast of any country as belonging to that nation as well. This is incredibly important, as any resources contained in the coastal stretches of these countries belong to them.

Incorporating these coastal areas, known as Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ), architects Rafi Segal and Yonatan Cohen created a world map for openDemocracy to reflect the extended borders of every country in the world…

(Click images for larger versions…)

Of course, many countries have less than 200 miles between them, so various treaties between these nations govern who controls these waters. In some cases, the map reflects open disagreements, such as the dispute between Brunei, China, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam in the South China Sea.

In other cases there are regions of joint control, such as the waters surrounding the Serranilla Bank and nearby Bajo Nuevo Bank in the Caribbean Sea. In this region, there’s a combination of shared rights and open disputes between Colombia, Jamaica, Honduras, Nicaragua, and the United States over how exactly to administer several partially submerged coral reefs. Most disputes are related to tiny, desolate, uninhabited islands, as the nation governing these remote islands controls the surrounding waters.

All of these disputed regions are in constant flux as countries battle for control of the ocean’s resources, so their statuses are bound to change with time. However, this map, updated within the last year, offers some perspective for how much maritime territory each country actually controls.

Here are several close-ups of more crowded waters around the world, where the sea disappears in a mass of political boundaries…