Have you ever looked at a map of the Pacific and wondered who actually makes the lines that separate one island nation from the next?
Well, one of the key characters in the story to chart the region’s maritime boundaries is a young, softly spoken cartographer by the name of Emily Artack.
Artack was just 22 years old when she first joined the Regional Maritime Boundaries Project at the Pacific Islands Applied Geocience Commission (SOPAC) back in 2003.
In recent months she has been playing a critical role in helping countries define and map their maritime boundaries as they rush to meet the deadline to submit claims to the continental shelf area beyond their 200-nautical mile Exclusive Economic Zones.
Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, eight Pacific Islands countries have until May 13, 2009 to submit claims to the continental shelf area beyond their 200-nautical mile Exclusive Economic Zones.
If successful, claims from Fiji, Solomon Islands, Palau, Federated States of Micronesia, Tonga, Papua New Guinea and the Cook Islands would extend their jurisdiction over a combined area of 1.5 million square kilometres of seabed rich in minerals, copper, gold, petroleum and other resources. Because Kiribati signed the convention at a later date, it has until 2013 to make its submission.
To be successful, any claims over additional areas of ocean space must be based upon sound technical data and meet the strict requirements prescribed within the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
The technical and legal support required to support credible claims are expensive and time consuming. PNG alone has set aside more than K$25 million to support its submission to the United Nations. In April this year, Australia was granted jurisdiction over an additional 2.5 million square kilometres of seabed and it can now lay claim to any oil, gas and biological resources across an area 10 times the size of New Zealand.
However, it was only successful after 17 marine surveys spanning more than eight years and a further four years of negotiations following its initial submission in 2004.
Without the support of SOPAC’s Regional Maritime Boundaries Project, Artack says countries would find it difficult to undertake the complex and expensive work of collecting and analysing technical data required to support their submissions.
She says the success of any national claims will depend on the ability of countries to present a technically sound case that is based on internationally recognised standards.
“A big part of our job is to make sure a country’s maps meet international standards. If a country’s maps are based on an old reference system, we then have to go out into the field and get the data we need to upgrade them. For example, Fiji’s reference system was developed in 1972 and any submission based on this old system simply wouldn’t be acceptable to the UN,” she says.
Artack says a big part of her job involves doing fieldwork to verify the “base points” used to calculate these international limits. These base points are often calculated from the outmost points of a reef through the use of satellite images, remote sensing applications and GPS surveying methods.
While much of Artack’s work is based in the office, she says the fieldwork sometimes requires a healthy sense of adventure.
“I’m not a good swimmer so every time we go out on the boat I’m always reaching for the lifejacket. When you go to the edge of the reef and the waves are crashing and there we are on this little boat trying to collect map coordinates. That’s when you really think to yourself, “I’m sure that Occupational Health and Safety doesn’t cover me on this little boat',” she laughs.
During field surveys, Artack says their team also needs to locate ground reference marks that were first set way back in 1979. These marks are usually iron rods, pipes, or concrete monuments that were used as reference points for earlier surveys.
“It can be quite challenging to get to the marks in some of these more remote places, especially when you have to clear away trees that have been growing for almost 30 years.
“Sometimes you can be in the hot sun for hours and hours struggling to find this little pin in the middle of the ground. At those times I think to myself ‘What on earth am I doing here? I could be back in front of my computer in a nice air conditioned office!’”, she says
Growing up in Lautoka, Artack never thought she would become a cartographer despite the fact that both her parents are geography teachers. After receiving a scholarship, she travelled to the Royal Institute of Technology in Melbourne where she spent the next four years studying the theory behind GIS and remote sensing.
“When I went to study mapping in Melbourne, I originally thought I’d come back to Fiji and work for the elections office or something like that. It was only when I joined SOPAC that I started to learn about maritime boundaries and sovereignty over maritime zones,” she says.
Although she has been offered a number of jobs in Australia, Artack says her heart is in the Pacific, especially with the satisfaction she gets from knowing her work could ultimately help to deliver real benefits to Pacific Islands communities.
“We are really going to keep pushing the countries to meet the May deadline because if they miss it, they will miss out on all the potential revenue from areas such as deepsea mining and bio-prospecting,” she says.
Artack says that one of the most satisfying parts of her job is providing on-the-job training to nationals from the region on GIS and the management of their maritime information and data. However, although she is an expert map-maker, she admits that she’s not always the world’s best map reader.
“I was lucky enough to be asked to go to London to present at the World Maritime Conference. The first thing I did when I arrived was to get hold of the map to the underground railway and, you know, I got lost almost immediately! I was just standing there thinking to myself...'Man I’m a cartographer and I can’t even work out the orientation of this silly map!’”