Abstract:
The national development of Sri Lanka is inevitably tied to its marine resources within
the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) and beyond the EEZ; legal continental shelf. United
Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) provides the necessary legal
framework to extend the legal continental shelf rights beyond 200 M limits. Owing to
unique geographical characters of the Bay of Bengal, a special set of rules is provided in
Statement of Understanding (SOU), Annex II, Final Act to UNCLOS III, in establishing
extended legal continental shelves for the Coastal States in the southern part of the Bay of
Bengal. In adopting the SOU, as one of the requirements, such coastal states has to
confirm that “the average distance at which the 200 meter isobath occurs is not more than
20 nautical miles” (SOU, Para 1).
In fulfilling the above requirement for Sri Lanka, bathymetry data of near offshore has
been collected and compiled to a database. GEBCO, one minute grid, has been considered
as the primary data layer in building up of the database. Besides of the GEBCO database,
bathymetry from single channel seismic cruises and surveys conducted for petroleum
resources along with the Admiralty Charts were taken into account.
Collected data were analyzed both in Geocap and Geosoft packages and the output map
was synthesized with ArcGis facilities. Distance to the 200m isobath was calculated from
corresponding basepoints and the averaged value was determined. The final results proved
that the average distance to the 200m isobath from the basepoints is 10.5m. This analysis
assures that Sri Lanka fulfills this requirement; a presence of a narrow continental shelf,
which is one of special characters to adopt Statement Of Understanding (SOU) as costal
state in the southern part of the Bay of Bengal.
