Peter,
The
issue of vertical sovereignty is an important one. In the earth, the line
extends through the geoid into an imaginary center point in the
core. In the 1920s the World Court settled a mining
dispute between the Netherlands and Germany whereby the stream boundary,
which followed the meandering thalweg, did not apply to the underground
boundary, which was based on a greatly simplified median line. Of course,
this means no slant oil drilling -- but it says nothing of one state
tapping into the peripheral edge of another state's larger reserves (common
accusations in the Middle East and now in the Caspian).
Air
space is crudely defined as the limit to which an air breathing aircraft can fly
without having to carry its own oxygen source to propell itself, but I have also
heard it defined as the limit to which a state can shoot down an invading
aircraft from the ground (kind of like the modern version of the 3 nm maritime
limit under Napoleonic law). However, this commonly shared dictum is not
supported by a body of international law.
Space
law is even more nebulous. There is likewise no body of commonly accepted
international law, but it is universally accepted that space craft are free to
hover over the earth so long as they are in an orbit where they are not using
extensive propulsion means to resist the earth's gravitational pull.
Hence a satellite is austensibly free to fly over any part of the globe.
What it does over that part of the globe may or may not be governed by the owner
of the satellite (US getting satellite owners to agree to a ban imagery
collection over Afghanistan for the present) or bilateral arrangements between
owners and states. Of course, the UN states have largely agreed to the
peaceful uses of space.
I am
most interested in the book you cite. Is it still commercially available
(I can read Dutch).
Ray
-----Original Message-----
From: Peter
Smaardijk [mailto:smaardijk@...]
Sent: Saturday, November 24,
2001 9:15 AM
To: BoundaryPoint@yahoogroups.com
Subject:
[BoundaryPoint] Three-dimensional boundaries
Normally, boundaries are only two-dimensional, and as
far as I know
everything straight below and above the surface belongs to
the
country that IS that surface. I don't know of any lower or upper
limitations of national soil (centre of the earth??) or airspace
(outermost atmosphere??), but I think the boundaries "up" and "down"
are at right-angles with those on the surface of the earth (of course
not when the boundary is on a slope, but I think you know what I
mean). But in a book I recently bought on a second-hand book market,
I
found this item about the benl boundary in the river Meuse:
"The
sovereignty of both riverine states extends to the thalweg; at
bridges,
however, the boundary is in the middle of the central arch
of the bridge,
a point which doesn't coincide with the thalweg below.
An invisible line
from the thalweg below the bridge to the point in
the middle of the
central arch of the bridge is the imaginary
boundary line. This imaginary
line practically never is at right-
angles with the water of the Meuse.
This can only be if the thalweg
is right in the middle, which practically
never is the case. The
imaginary three-dimensional line is at a constantly
shifting angle
with both river and bridge, as the thalweg is constantly
shifting."
(from "De grens gemarkeerd, Grenspalen en grenskantoren aan de
landzijde", by Paul Spapens and Kees van Kemenade, Hapert, 1992, page
34)
Are there any other examples of oblique (vis-a-vis the
vertical)
boundary lines? Perhaps also below the (ground or water)
surface?
Any ideas, anyone?
Peter S.
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