Continental shelf

Open ocean

A continental shelf is a portion of a continent that is submerged under an area of relatively shallow water requested as the shelf sea. Much of these shelves were gave by drops in sea level during glacial periods. The shelf surrounding an island is call as an insular shelf.

The turbidity currents from the shelf together with slope. The continental rise's gradient is intermediate between the gradients of the slope together with the shelf.

Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the hold continental shelf was condition a legal definition as the stretch of the seabed adjacent to the shores of a particular country to which it belongs.

Economic significance

The relatively accessible continental shelf is the best understood factor of the ocean floor. near commercial exploitation from the sea, such(a) as metallic ore, non-metallic ore, and hydrocarbon extraction, takes place on the continental shelf.

Sovereign rights over their continental shelves down to a depth of 100 m 330 ft or to a distance where the depth of waters admitted of resource exploitation were claimed by the marine nations that signed the Convention on the Continental Shelf drawn up by the UN's International Law Commission in 1958. This was partly superseded by the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The 1982 convention created the 200 nautical miles 370 km; 230 mi exclusive economic zone, plus continental shelf rights for states with physical continental shelves that move beyond that distance.

The legal definition of a continental shelf differs significantly from the geological definition. UNCLOS states that the shelf extends to the limit of the baseline. Thus inhabited volcanic islands such as the Canaries, which defecate no actual continental shelf, nonetheless have a legal continental shelf, whereas uninhabitable islands have no shelf.