Pre-Reading Notes

Well hi there! You’ve reached Chapter 10: Oceania!

First of all, I want to apologize to Oceania. Oceania, I’m sorry. You’re kind of a forgotten region – and in fact, a lot of professors just skip you, especially with longer textbooks. You’re also kind of all over the place, and that’s my fault. Antarctica. The Arctic. (Both of which have more “c”s in them than students think. I often see it spelled “Artic” and “Antartic.”) Australia. Easter Island. You all don’t belong together. And you’re not even connected.

And yet, perhaps what unifies this region really is the ocean and the vast distances that separate the places in this realm. Easter Island, for example, is 1200 miles (over 1900 km) for its nearest neighbor, the Pitcairn Islands. This is a region whose isolation has served some benefit historically, enabling the development of unique cultures and offering some protection from outsiders. But this same isolation has made global connections difficult and, I’ve found, has made it difficult for the states here to garner international interest about the problems they’re facing.

The core focus of this chapter is biogeography. If you like the study of plants and animals, and you like geography, then this chapter is for you!

The learning objectives for Chapter 10, and questions you might consider, are:

• Identify the key geographic features of Australia, the Pacific, and the polar regions
  • What are some of the prominent geographic features in this realm?
  • How does the geography of the Pacific islands differ?
  • What are some characteristics of the world’s oceans, and how have they been divided?
• Describe the biodiversity found in Australia and the Pacific
  • Why does this region have such considerable biodiversity?
  • What are some of the threats to biodiversity in this region?
• Explain the patterns of human settlement in Oceania
  • How did humans first arrive in this region, and what are some of the indigenous groups found here?
  • How was this region impacted by colonization?
• Analyze how climate change is impacting the geography of Oceania
  • What are some of the most significant environmental challenges facing this region?

Don’t forget to add your own review questions to this list as you read the chapter!

Now let’s finish up with Chapter 10 in the textbook!

Notes After Reading

Welcome back! Thanks for sticking with it!

First of all, can we talk about the garbage patch (really garbage patches plural) a moment? I mean, if you were ever driving in a car and thought to yourself, “I’m just going to go ahead and chuck this empty bottled water out the window” (who does that, anyway?), hopefully this chapter will make you think twice. This is where all of that trash eventually ends up. And this is also the region where we’re seeing some of the first effects of climate change, from sea level rise to people having to migrate because of a changing climate. But as I mentioned in Part A, this area is so remote (and some aren’t even independent states) that I think their voices have been relatively overshadowed in some of the discussions.

What I find confuses students most in this chapter is the division of the world’s oceans, and it’s actually super important because it explains some ongoing disputes. So let’s go back to this figure:

Okay, so way back when, basically your land was your land. If you had a lake inside your landmass, it was clearly yours. But the oceans? They were just there and everyone had a right to come and go or use resources as they pleased. So the United States was the first to say, “Hey world. Our country is not just the land. We’ve got the whole continental shelf, baby. Booyah!” (Okay, this isn’t a direct quote. But you get the idea.) (Also, after my kids watched Despicable Me, they were really into saying “Booyah!” which kind of cracked me up.) Other countries did the same thing (the ocean thing, not the “Booyah!” thing) and it was just a mess. So the U.N. stepped in and created a system of ocean ownership. This was the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). So now we have the system outlined in the figure above. Let’s go over it a bit.

So the land is the land. That’s easy. Any water in your land, also easy. That’s all yours. Enjoy. 12 nautical miles (whatever that means) (Okay, did a little deep dive and it’s one minute of latitude and a knot is one nautical mile per hour. It’s like just over a mile on land), anyway 12 nautical miles out from a country’s landmass is considered its territorial waters. A country can set its own laws governing this water, just as it would do on land, use its resources, regulate who goes in and out, etc. Other country’s vessels do have the right to “innocent passage” though. But if you’re like a massive warship trying to bomb us, I’m maybe not going to let you in.

12 nautical miles out from that is the contiguous zone. There are four specific things a country can control here if they are about to occur in the territorial waters: customs, taxation, immigration, and pollution. So basically another country can’t just pollute a bunch in the contiguous zone if it’s going to float into the territorial waters. I mean, you can’t just pollute the ocean in general because there are international laws governing it, but you get the idea.

Now comes the big one: 200 nautical miles out from a country is the exclusive economic zone. And if you can’t remember what it is, it is literally exactly what it sounds like. It’s where a country has exclusive economic rights over any resources found there. Now think about that for a moment. Imagine a tiny island in the ocean and now imagine a 200-mile (ish. You know, the nautical mile thing again) radius circle around it. That is a HUGE area. So this meant that countries started fighting over control of even very small islands, and many were then hesitant to give up colonial holdings because this meant you’d lose that massive economic resource. The dispute over the South China Sea, for example, is in part a conflict over control of marine waters. Mauritius has an enormous EEZ, over 2.3 million square kilometers, but is in a dispute with both France and the United Kingdom over a couple of islands within the EEZ. There are a number of other ongoing EEZ disputes as well.

Beyond that is just international waters where it’s a bit of a free-for-all. Anyone can use resources in this zone, though there are international agreements governing some things like pollution.

Well you’ve reached the end! Excellent work! Don’t forget to go back to the chapter questions and test yourself!