At the turn of the 19th century, France's vast province of Louisiana was equal in size to the United States. It encompassed the lands between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains. First Consul Napoleon intended that this would be his foothold to secure eventual dominion over North America.
By 1803 Napoleon's dream for North America was fading. He was at war with Great Britain and badly needed money for his campaigns in Europe and the Mediterranean. In a swift month-long negotiation, the United States made the Louisiana Purchase for about $12 million. With a stroke of the pen, the size of the nation doubled.
President Thomas Jefferson then ordered that an expedition be organized to explore not only the Louisiana Purchase but also the lands beyond the Rockies to the Pacific Ocean. There was hope there might be a waterway from the Mississippi west to the ocean.
The three-year expedition, led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, helped describe and define the wealth of the Louisiana Purchase and produced similar information on the lands west to the Pacific. It truly opened the West.
Two centuries years later, a similar grand exploration opportunity faces the United States. It is in the 200-nautical-mile-wide "exclusive economic zone" (EEZ) that borders U.S. coastlines. Covering 3.9 billion acres, this region is about one-third larger in area than the terrestrial United States (2.3 billion acres). Here the nation has sovereign rights over resources, economic activity, and control of pollution from the surface of the ocean to beneath the seafloor.
The Third United Nations Law of the Sea Conference (19721982) established the EEZ concept. As the conference neared completion, the United States declared it would not sign the treaty draft; the sticking point was related to ocean mining issues. When these could not be settled, President Ronald Reagan withdrew U.S. participation.
In 1983, however, he issued a presidential proclamation establishing an EEZ for the United States. This unilateral action represented the single largest accession of territorial rights in the history of the nation. Furthermore, this would become the largest EEZ area in the world. Regrettably, the event hardly was noted at the time and even today few Americans are aware of this major addition to the nation's expanse.
As with the Louisiana Purchase, an exploration effort began a year after the EEZ proclamation. The U.S. Geological Survey recognized the importance of mapping this new acquisition. It chartered a survey ship with the GLORIA towed sonar mapping system from Britain's Institute of Ocean Sciences, and from 1984 to 1990 this system swept over almost the entire U.S. EEZ mapping the rough topography of the seafloor.
In 1987, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration joined with the Geological Survey in the Joint Office for Mapping and Research Survey. This union was intended to make each agency's survey efforts better coordinated and more productive.
Prior to the GLORIA surveys, there had been almost no detailed surveys offshore, and precise soundings were made only in those more shallow areas where ships navigated or where resources such as oil and gas were being produced. GLORIA resulted in a picture of the rough bottom topography of the continental shelf and adjacent continental slope. Literally thousands of seafloor features were seen for the first time. In the Pacific alone, hundreds of submarine volcanoes were discovered.
The results were very promising, but GLORIA is not a high resolution system. The approximate "face of the deep" is now known, but much more detail and extensive physical sampling are required to assess precisely the resources' value and the processes occurring in this vast unknown region.
Using the seagoing assets available today, a complete resource survey of the U.S. EEZ will take several decades to complete. In addition to fine-grain bottom topography/bathymetry, there are requirements for sub-bottom profiling, physical sampling, and studies of ocean processes in the region. Both living and nonliving domains must be located, imaged, and described. The payoff is for the United States to develop new supplies of resources for the benefit of all its citizens.
A splendid and imaginative commemoration of the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition would be "Lewis and Clark II," a program to explore the single largest territorial acquisition in the history of the United States.