Secrecy & spectacle, or how a tale of seabed exploitation shaped the U.S.’s relationship to the law of the sea

Abstract

How do representations of extractive frontiers shape political geographies? This study examines one episode, that of the USNS Hughes Glomar Explorer, and finds that, while it has often been told as a piece of military history or a Cold War espionage adventure, its role in U.S. domestic law, U.S. engagement with international law, and the effect of the complex interaction between the two on global legal order has been overlooked. An examination of the legal documents, popular press, and conference proceedings that are the episode’s artifacts makes evident that its simultaneous publicity and concealment contributed to the complex and enduring geographies of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. While the rich body of scholarship in marine geography shows how representations of the ocean have primed it as a space of extraction and enclosure, this story contributes new insight, as, unlike in many cases, here the display of obfuscation rather than of information constructed the seabed as a resource frontier. The story’s portrayals in news, legislative sessions, industry circles, and international negotiations foregrounded its withholding of representation, creating an extractive frontier that competing political ideologies could appropriate to their respective ends. In and of itself this moment is an important one in the history of ocean territories, and more broadly it invites us to interrogate how we shape longlasting legal regimes around current representations of the sea.