Continental shelf of the United States

The continental shelf of the United States is the total of the continental shelves adjacent to the United States. It is both an entity of marine geology, the elevated seabed near US coasts, and in the political sense, the area claimed by the United States as sovereign, according to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

Diagram of the newly-claimed Extended Continental Shelf and the existing claims of continental shelves of the United States

Geopolitics

The continental shelf of the United States serves as the limit of United States sovereign power, when not demarcated by an actual land border. Due to the fact that "The coastal State exercises over the continental shelf sovereign rights," the continental shelf serves as the territorial sea of the United States, and as such, is claimed by the United States.

The seabed claimed by the United States is claimed as continental shelf due to a combination of qualifications offered by article 76 in the UN convention. These qualifications most notably include paragraph 4(b), paragraph 5, and paragraph 7, in article 76.

Marine geology

The submerged part of the U.S. continental shelf that is seawards and outside of the jurisdictions of the individual U.S. states is called the Outer Continental Shelf. This Outer Continental Shelf is a peculiarity of the political geography of the United States and is the part of the internationally recognized continental shelf of the United States.