New Norwegian land could emerge from the Atlantic Ocean | Hacker News Reader

New Norwegian land could emerge from the Atlantic Ocean

sciencenorway.no

119 pointsLastNevadan90 comments

Article's subtitle: "Many active volcanoes can be found on the seabed within Norway's maritime borders. Some are now only a few metres below sea level. "

The first para mentions that it's west of Jan Mayen ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Mayen ).

So - not exactly high-value real estate. Even before you factor in the lush "above 70 degrees north, on the edge of the Greenland Sea" climate.

It might be really high value if it gives Norway claims to much more area and a larger exclusive economic zone in the Atlantic.

Maybe. If the peak of an active volcano or few actually counts for your EEZ. If the peak doesn't blow up or get washed away before it's been there long enough to count. IANAL. If/how/when EEZ's change, when a sliver of new land pops up, strikes me as a pretty rare & special legal specialty.

China's made an entire business of expanding their territory by putting airfields on top of half-underwater islands. The Spratlys are horseshoe shaped atolls but have proven it can be done effectively and defensibly. (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/21/china-has-full...) You also get a ~200 mile EEZ for fishing and mineral rights, and a 6-12 mile territorial waters in the area as well. Portugal has been working on staking out an enormous chunk of the north atlantic for the last decade or so using similar strategy.

What China - a superpower with a very confrontational and combative attitude - can get away with in its own back yard might be quite different from what modest little Norway can or would try to do in the Greenland Sea.

Also, talk to a few volcanologists and marine engineers about trying to build airfields on the tops of barely-above water active volcanoes. (Vs. China is building on shallow, solid, inactive atolls.)

> Also, talk to a few volcanologists and marine engineers about trying to build airfields on the tops of barely-above water active volcanoes.

Discount plane parking/moorage/incineration?

Moorage with built-in incineration solves the problem of what to do with the boats when the owners disappear.

And Norway has plenty of EEZ, China is short on it.

I think we need to understand that China is not "confrontational and combative" in a negative way.

Think of it more like the kid who's been bullied for years and years and when puberty hits is finally able to stand his ground. That's China, and they're not the only ones who have been bullied over the last centuries and who may be able to stand their ground soon.

Disagree. The Spratly island shenanigans, in particular, are squarely aimed at Malaysia, Taiwan, the Philippines and Vietnam, which in your analogy are the smaller, younger victims of the bullies.

China has been claiming the South China Sea since before the PRC, hence why the claims by the ROC/Taiwan are same: the PRC took over the ROC's claims. Of course this is not the 'correct' narrative to say that...

Every country has been acting the same. Look at what the US control and ask why that is. The difference is that China has been on the receiving end of the stick over the last centuries while the US (for instance) has been on the giving end. There is no right and wrong, just being weak or being strong.

"Since you know as well as we do the right, as the world goes, is only in question between equal power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must"

https://www.nku.edu/~weirk/ir/melian.html

Well, exactly.

Some of the replies I get are childish and ridiculous. The US control land almost up to the Chinese coast bit China is the bully for finally being able to assert a few claims in the South China Sea... how far can hypocrisy go

As for the neighbours' input, we'll ask Mexico, Cuba, and South America...

> The US control land almost up to the Chinese coast

Curious, what land is this?

He must mean Guam?

I thought of that but Guam is ~1700nm from the Chinese coast. Surely that can't be it.

Camp Casey maybe? That's something like 200mi from the Chinese border (through NK of course).

> There is no right and wrong, just being weak or being strong.

Just six comments deep from random coastal volcano and we are already at the Nietzschian übermensch, that escalated quickly!

In the larger picture, let us all consider the logical fallacy of tu quoque. A counter-claim that "you do it too" does not refute the original claim.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

Tell that to the British/Spanish/French Empire or Uncle Sam!

So you're suggesting we should apply mid-1800s ethical standards to a global superpower in 2023?

Colonial attitudes have changed. Western powers gave up their territorial maximalist doctrine a long time ago. Basically all former colonies of the West are now independent.

Meanwhile China is engaging in neo-colonialism with Belt and Road. You can handwave about "might makes right" but the reality is that by the standards of our day, China is not proving to be a force for justice or equity either at home or on the world stage and we ought to frown on that.

What I am saying is that "ethical standard" have never been a thing with respect to those kind of issues.

I'm pretty sure that's just objectively untrue. Some nations are subject to public opinion and the ethical sensibility of their electorates, and some are not. That comes into stark relief when some nations chop up journalists inside their embassies.

It's not objective, only subjective through the lens of those who are writing the narrative, who are?...

Objectively, what China is doing is not worse than what the US have been doing, or than any Western powers have been doing because it's just how it goes.

So if certain western countries had done something back in the 19th or first half of the 20th century it's supposedly alright for China to behave the same way now?

Why? Your 'arguments' don't really make much sense. I mean whatever US was doing in the 19/20th centuries was no worse than what the other colonial powers did a hundred or two hundred years before that. Which was no worse than what the Mongols did during the middle ages. So according to this 'logic' everything everyone does is completely justifiable because someone did something worse at some point in the past? Absurd...

Western powers didn't give up their doctrine easy. There was entire movement of anti-colonialism and non-alignment, sometimes followed by the wars for liberation - French Indochina, Vietnam, Algiers, just to mention few. If there were no wars, I doubt that western powers would give up on their colonies on their own.

I disagree, it simply would've taken longer. The West is democratic, and attitudes changed. In the mid-to-late 1800s, the prevailing philosophy justifying colonialism was rooted in racism, e.g. Kipling's "The White Man's Burden".

75 years after that was written, it was well outside the political mainstream.

The point is not claim but action. Many other countries have water disputes but no one outright builds new military airbases in international territory and bullies others whenever they come close. Some sort of peaceful, lawful process is followed in all cases but one.

Saying that ROC and PRC have same claims doesn't say they would be same in their disregard for general order

Trying to excuse your bullying behavior by pointing at someone else's behavior isn't actually justifying your own.

> China has been claiming the South China Sea since before the PRC, hence why the claims by the ROC/Taiwan are same: the PRC took over the ROC's claims. Of course this is not the 'correct' narrative to say that...

This is ahistorical. The nine dash line is a creation of the CCP, not of the ROC. It was not claimed from the ROC's time. More importantly however, it's just a claim. China went and built military bases on objects that were in other countries' already existing territory before the nine dash line was created and then committed military attacks against civilian vessels who used to use the areas to force them away.

> Look at what the US control and ask why that is.

Much of it is former territories that were taken over after WW2 defeat of the Imperial Japan, and many of those territories have over time been either been given independence, given the option of independence, or given to other countries.

> The nine dash line is a creation of the CCP, not of the ROC. It was not claimed from the ROC's time.

That's factually incorrect. The ROC calls it the eleven dash line (PRC removed 2 dashes at the border with Vietnam) and they were the ones who created it before the PRC even existed [1]

Mainland China has taken possession because they are now strong enough to do it. It was only a claim before because they were too weak to assert their claim physically, which any large power would have done, or to make the others recognize that claim.

> other countries' already existing territory

The borders of all the countries in the areas were decided by Western colonial powers, and China was simply too weak to assert its interests and wasn't invited.

There is not right or wrong here. This is simply power and how things have always worked. It's naive to buy the "good guys bad guys" or "bully" narrative, which is only propaganda from one side against the other.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine-dash_line

Those kids often are the worst bullies!

You’re conveniently ignoring a couple thousand years where China bullied its neighbors relentlessly.

And, you know, the present. Should I really care more about China being bullied 70 years ago than China bullying right now?

The nine dash line is not at all standing their ground.

China has not been "bullied for years". They have a imagined chip on their shoulders and a persecution complex. It reminds me a lot of how Russia describes it's invasion of Ukraine. The messaging to the public is in terms of "Russia has always been attacked" and how "the invasion is actually defensive in nature because NATO has always been planning on attacking Russia" (note: NATO is a defensive alliance and never even had plans for invading Russia).

What you're hearing is not truth, but is instead the internal propaganda that is used to defend against criticism of the national government by creating an external opponent for the populace to focus on. It's a time honored tradition of dictatorships the world over.

Opium wars, Japanese occupation, US Chinese exclusion act, etc. China was bullied. The extant generation of Chinese has not directly experienced most of it, but it's not just a chip on the shoulder.

I think claiming the whole south china sea is ridiculous because there's no principle behind it. A coastal EEZ is a principle, but if China can claim the south china sea why can't Vietnam?

I also struggle to formulate a strong argument against claiming and developing an uninhabited reef. China is by no means the only country participating in the spratly islands land grab, and to my knowledge no country has ever shied away from claiming uninhabited land. International Maritime law was not formulated to deal with this situation. I think China's neighbors will more likely than not be able to maintain their reasonable Maritime rights. If not, I think China will find wanton domination to be more trouble than it's worth.

Japan occupied many countries during WW2, it's only the CCP that still cares to the extent that they do about it. In fact in many of the countries that Japan occupied there is now strong pro-Japan sentiment, but not China.

The US Chinese exclusion act can not be termed "bullying of China" as it was explicitly about internal US politics rather than international politics. If that is termed bullying of a country then any anti-immigration law throughout history would be bullying of some country or another.

I'm not entirely understanding your position here. The series of "Unequal Treaties" [1] China regularly refers to are not imaginary. It started with the Opium Wars. These were a series of two wars in which the Brits insisted on selling opium in China, which had banned the trade. When China tried to stop opium ships, Britain invaded, plundered China, and forced them into a series of somewhat humiliating concessions.

Among these concessions was Britain claiming Hong Kong for themselves (which was only returned in 1997). Interestingly enough this happened twice! The legality of the opium was not completely clarified in the first war. After the second war the Brits forced China to legally accept their opium. And it just gets more sordid from there, with various "Unequal Treaties" continuing onward into the 20th century.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Unequal_treaty

Those treaties and the end of them long pre-date the CCP. There is no one alive today that was around during that time period. That they are still talked about is part of the internal propaganda of the CCP to propagate the idea that the world is out to get them.

Also, if they were so important to the Chinese people then they would still be talked about strongly in Taiwan which has a shared history going back to then and, as far as I know, they don't care nearly as much about it as the people living under the CCP.

> Among these concessions was Britain claiming Hong Kong for themselves (which was only returned in 1997).

Much to the dislike of the people actually living in Hong Kong. They would have preferred to never go back to being part of being China. This is another great example of CCP/Chinese aggression and colonialism against the world as opposed to their supposed persecution complex.

To imagine history, and all of its consequences, dies with one generation is a view you obviously do not hold. And so I do not believe you are arguing in good faith. I'm not doing this to 'mic drop' because I'm more than happy to continue this discussion, but because I think you yourself might not even be thinking about what you're saying - rather than just shooting, somewhat wildly, from the hip.

The consequences have lasting effects of course, but to assume that current governments maintain those same policies from hundreds of years ago is ridiculous. China should take an example from the US, our former enemies are now some of our strongest allies (Japan and Germany), or at the minimum have strongly endorsed our culture (Vietnam). It happens by not holding grudges, as China is fond to do.

If you believe much has changed, I would encourage you to look to the Mideast. Millions of dead bodies and countless destroyed governments are testament to the fact that opposing Western interests is like to be met with the bombs wrapped in slogans of freedom, human rights, and democracy.

Of course the Mideast is largely unable to speak for itself because their culture, religion, and language leave them culturally isolated from the West. In many ways our treatment of the Mideast today, and their situation, is directly analogous to how we treated China in the past and the situation they were in. So I would argue what has changed has not been our behavior, but China's ability to defend itself.

And now we take the standard Chinese propaganist route of re-directing the argument away from Asia and to the middle east whenever a complicated issue of Asian geopolitics with regards to the US happens. It's become a good benchmark for when someone is arguing in bad faith when they start reciting CCP talking points with near identical wording every time certain subjects come up.

Also, China will repeat the same missteps of the US in the middle east as soon as their first major interruption of fossil fuels happens. China is not immune.

Your argument was that the West has changed, and China claiming we haven't is wrong. The Mideast rather strongly supports the Chinese view, and so far as I can tell - there's not really much to oppose it. As for propaganda, during the Cold War we engaged in extensive propaganda. That included things like imagery of stocked grocery store shelves. That those things were used as propaganda did not mean that they did not exist, or were somehow inherently false.

The Opium wars ended 163 years ago.

It's long since time to move on.

China itself has committed many horrific crimes during that time.

Portugal has a ton of actual islands though

> You also get a ~200 mile EEZ for fishing and mineral rights, and a 6-12 mile territorial waters in the area as well.

You don't get those for artificial lands or for insufficiently substantial islands. And an international arbitration under UNCLOS already ruled against Chinese claims in this regard.

You're correct, but it's a bit of a moot point because nobody can fish in these areas without being harassed by Chinese military.

They dont need islands to do that.

Conveniently placed supply bases sure help

It's a twisted sense of appreciation, but I appreciate the likes of China and Russia for calling the west's bluffs and proving time and time again that all those nice words written on stacks of paper are just stacks of paper.

The problem for the managerial class is ultimately that all their power comes from the power structure and having other people do as they say and enforce their papers. Ancient greeks were trained as warriors, and would defeat slave uprisings by their very own hands. Todays rulers can't carry their own bag.

"John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it." -Andrew Jackson

Sometimes the words get backed up. Russia is finding ignoring the bits of paper agreeing Ukraines borders is not quite as easy as they thought.

Did Russia call the West’s bluff? Because it seems like they’ve found themselves in a war far worse than Vietnam with far worse prospects. If anything I would think that Russia did not expect the degree of support and coordination the US would be willing to provide.

Similarly Biden has said that US troops would defend Taiwan in the event of an invasion. I don’t think that’s a bluff. Do you?

Well yes, but China claims that their development of the islands makes them sufficiently substantial. They've built airports, military bases, ports and entire developments. Check out the 'before and after' photos. [1]

Frankly, I think their claim may just get upheld in due course. To be clear I think it's shameful and an environmental catastrophe, but I've no doubt they will invest as much time and effort as deemed necessary to make these substantial islands.

[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/chinas-artificial-islands-...

> The reef itself was only 7.2 square kilometers; it has been expanded to add another 100,000 square meters.

This sounds as though the author doesn't know that 100,000 square metres = 0.1 square kilometres.

Agreed, as peer pointed out that's bad journalism. It's also old (a 2016 write-up). I imagine it's evolved a lot since.

Haha, journalists are really something else

> The reef itself was only 7.2 square kilometers; it has been expanded to add another 100,000 square meters.

So they took a 7.2 km^2 thing and made it 7.3 km^2?

Cool photos by the way. Thank you for sharing link.

Well the territory hasn't really expanded as no one recognizes them.

Maybe there is oil there

This headline instantly conjured up an image of Norwegian black metal bands thrashing away as a black basalt island rises slowly out of the abyss with smoke and fire and lightning...

I'd buy that album!

That photo of the Beerenberg volcano in the first part of the article is stunning.

How would this work? If suddenly a brand new island appeared, who owns it? Assuming it's off Norways coast, Norway owns it. But what happens if it's between two country coasts or nobodies?

It's actually covered under the universal dibs clause. Dibs!

If it’s within 200 miles of land, there’s established protocol under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea[0] to demarcate maritime boundaries based on land borders. If the border went through the island there would need to be some sort of treaty negotiation to establish sovereignty.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Convention_on...

So asssume there’s a 20 mile gap between, and the island appears 18 miles of country A’s coast, clearly it’s part of country A.

Is the new maritime border still at the 20 mile mark or is it equidistant between the new island, 11 miles off shore and 11 miles from country B.

But there great swathes of habitable land where we can’t agree globally on what country it is, so as usual it comes to down diplomacy.

The short version is that overlapping maritime borders are resolved by drawing the various buffer zones out from the shoreline of all coastal land of each country, and where they conflict take the approximate midpoint of the overlapping area as the border.

Small islands can therefore have an outsized impact on extending the territorial waters of a country, which is why there are so many territorial disputes over seemingly-insignificant uninhabited islands.

There's not always an unambiguous resolution to competing claims, see for example:

- China's "nine-dash line" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine-dash_line

- The Israeli–Lebanese maritime border dispute (which was only resolved last year) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli%E2%80%93Lebanese_marit...

Sure, Rockal being one controversial claim.

but in reality if new land appeared in the middle of the English Channel on the French side, I can’t imagine the U.K. being happy with suddenly losing a fair bit of EEZ.

China can get away with it because might makes right.

how it works is ultimately down to how badly the countries around it want that land, and any resources surrounding it. maybe the countries involved have a nice meeting, maybe they have a war.

The banner picture threw me off. I used to look at the silhouette of that island from my window on clear days and knew right away that was Iceland and not Norway.

meanwhile sea is gaining space with global warming

Nor in/near Norway.

Greenland is melting, which changes the earth's centre of gravity, which in turn leads the area around Greenland (all the way to Norway) to rise. Iceland, Baffin Island and some other islands near Greenland rise decisively more than the ocean, mainland Norway perhaps a bit more. This volcano near Jan Mayen might get a 10m boost over the next 200 years.

How does the earth's centre of gravity changing cause land to rise?

Water from melting ice is distributed around the globe, shifting CoG away from Greenland. This new water distribution is therefore uneven, more water getting to the other side.

Yes, I understand how the redistribution of water would cause the centre of gravity to change, but not how the changed centre of gravity would the land to rise.

Rise relative to sea level.

All the water starts to be attracted to the point slightly further from Northern Europe.

I guess it's easier if you ignore gravity, water and the earth's curvature.

The land on which you stand may be regarded as a floor. If you put something heavy on a floor, the part near the weight bends down. If you then remove the weight, the floor bends back up (except not 100%). The glacier on Greenland is heavy.

Or perhaps even easier if you include all three. The water that's currently a glacier pushing Greenland down will float elsewhere, and its weight will push most of the world's flooring down, but less so than currently, because the weight of that water will be distributed across a much larger area. That won't compress the planet's magma, ergo, some part of the floor rises as the weight shifts, and the part that lifts is the part under and near Greenland.

Will Earth no longer be an oblate spheroid?!?

if we had a conference there could we get away without a land acknowledgement or make one out to surtr just to be safe?

The land is rising, because it doesn't have miles of ice on top, at 8 mm/y. Give it a few millennia. No volcanoes needed.

Mainland Norway, yes.

The misleadingly-titled article is about events ~600 miles away from mainland Norway, along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

OK. But the Sea of Bothnia is getting shallower too.

I don't see any reason for new islands out there to belong to Norway. Probably they could be considered mine, just as well.

Hmm... A new micronation?

Of oil. It will be part of Norway.

It's near Jan Mayen which is technically defined as a microcontinent, a term I hadn't come across before.

Have not read it…but is it due to isostatic rebound?

That was my first thought, too. But instead it's just-barely-submarine volcanoes on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

The article is actually talking about volcanic activity building things up. I.e. active volcanoes building up relative to the seafloor immediately around them.

Isostatic rebound is also occurring for the overall area, though. It's just a smaller effect (millimeters to centimeters per year) vs the meters to hundreds of meters that can occur from an eruption.

(For those who don't know, isostatic rebound is occurring for large areas where the ice sheets were very thick during the last ice age. The lithosphere (rigid portion of the earth) "flexed" downward as a result, and it's currently still flexing back now that the ice is gone. The mantle has a very high viscosity, though, and needs to "flow" into the space as the lithosphere flexes back. That means it's a process that takes tens of thousands of years to equalize. "Flow" is in quotes, because most folks don't think of solids flowing. The mantle is solid rock, but solid rock does flow.)

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