| Summary/Abstract |
France owns the second largest maritime Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) in the world with nearly 11 million square kilometres (about 4 million square miles) and professes to have the biggest submarine area on the globe mainly in the Indo-Pacific; this surface is about to increase through the programme EXTRAPLAC, an acronym in French for “Reasoned Extension of the Continental Shelf ”. In this article Pierre Royer surveys some of the mineral assets at stake below increasingly coveted ocean floors.
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