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Comment by mattficke | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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