Australia's Marine Jurisdiction
As an island continent, Australia has sovereign rights over a vast area of ocean, along with the fishery, mineral, and petroleum resources found in that area. The management and protection of the waters that yield these resources is a complex task.
A web based interactive mapping and decision support system that improves access to integrated government and non-government information in the Australian Marine Jurisdiction.
In order to understand some of the issues in Australia's Maritime Jurisdiction, it is important to understand the definitions of a number of terms including nautical mile, coastal waters, territorial sea baseline and contiguous zone.
Procedures Describing Maritime BoundariesGeoscience Australia, in collaboration with other Australian Government departments and agencies, has developed a document which provides instructions relating to the spatial aspects of writing maritime regulatory boundary descriptions.
Critical to the determination of all maritime boundaries is the determination of the Territorial Sea Baseline around Australia and its remote offshore territories.
The Law of the Sea is a body of international rules and principles developed to regulate ocean space, as reflected in the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) Australia participated in all three United Nations conferences on the Law of the Sea and became party to UNCLOS in 1994.
Australia's Maritime Jurisdiction Map SeriesAustralia's Maritime Jurisdiction has been presented graphically in a series of maps available for download from Geoscience Australia.
A listing of related web sites on the topic of Australia's Maritime Jurisdiction and the Law of the Sea.
Topic contact: maritime@ga.gov.au Last updated: June 19, 2012
