[skissane]

> Is this a PR stunt? Is there an official body that classifies oceans?

The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) is the official body which defines the world's oceans. It is an intergovernmental international organization whose members are 94 countries, including all the world's major seagoing powers.

IHO hasn't officially recognised the existence of the Southern Ocean yet, but it is planning to. Part of the hold-up is a dispute with Australia over the boundaries of the Southern Ocean – the IHO wants to put its northern boundary at the 60th parallel south, the Australian government wants to put its northern boundary as the southern Australian coast (which reflects Australian cultural understandings of it.) The other part of the hold-up, is the process of updating the boundaries of the world's oceans is being delayed by some unrelated political issues, such as the "Sea of Japan" naming dispute between Japan and Korea.

But, unlike recognised international bodies such as the IHO, or even national government bodies, National Geographic magazine, or the National Geographic Society, has no formal authority to decide the boundaries of anything, including the world's oceans. So yeah, this is pretty much just PR.

[riffraff]

I'm very curious to know what most of the IHO's work looks like.

I'm imagining they have a yearly conference and they have an agenda like

* check if there are new oceans

* check if older oceans have gone away

* should we rename the oceans?

* snacks

[mikro2nd]

From their website (https://iho.int/): "IHO works to ensure that all the world's seas, oceans and navigable waters are surveyed and charted, thereby supporting safety of navigation and the protection of the marine environment. It coordinates the activities of national hydrographic offices and sets standards in order to promote uniformity in nautical charts and documents. It issues survey best practices and provides guidelines to maximize the use of hydrographic information."

Lest you think this merely a paper-shuffling exercise, if there's a shipping accident, a huge amount of legal liability rides on the accuracy and up-to-date information in the charts. What these guys do underpins a huge amount of maritime law and international shipping. Definitely one of the really important, useful international orgs.

[danielvf]

A friend has led an ISO standardized list that you are likely to have used.

One out of every ten academics in the field is going to going to disagree with a given naming scheme. Some percentage of these are going to become obsessed with how you've gotten it wrong. They'll publish literal, old school, paper books with ISBN numbers accusing you and your organization of systematic murder of indigenous peoples, then constantly make edits to Wikipedia with their book as proof. It will take a decade or more to get it off Wikipedia because a "fact" with ISBN number trumps everything.

You'll wake up mornings to all caps, incoherent emails from people who sound like mental asylum inmates, but claim to be professor-doctors at distant universities. They hate you. You have ruined science.

You'll have deranged stalkers who unleash hatred on everything you ever write online from this time forward. As you type a blog post or a tweet, you'll hear their screaming voices in your head, commenting on every sentence you write.

Inside your international recognized naming group will be all the pettiness of the triviality of academic politics.

Outside, politicians and national interests will demand that your list be used as a weapon against their enemies. The offices of heads of state will call your boss if there are even rumors of you making a wrong call.

In the end, only a few strong will remain in charge, able to navigate the internal and external foes, able to read the coming storms by the falling of the leaves, and with a superhuman knowledge of the possible reactions the academics and the external powers who matter. If the world is lucky, a few good changes will slip into the list from time to time, provided they don't anger the wrong people. Inconvenient opinions will be silently stonewalled until such a time as world power shifts. The relentless killing knife of evolution will toss away anyone who does not play the game by its rules.

This list you are making isn't about truth. It's about power.

[Clewza313]

Point 3 there is enough to keep quite a few diplomats busy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_of_Japan_naming_dispute

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_Gulf_naming_dispute

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Philippine_Sea

...and that's before even getting into maritime boundary/exclusive economic zone disputes.

[martyvis]

>the Australian government wants to put its northern boundary as the southern Australian coast (which reflects Australian cultural understandings of it.)

That's probably why as 57 year old Aussie, I'm wondering why this idea of the Southern Ocean is new. When I first went on a road trip 10 years ago on the Great Ocean Road, what I saw couldn't have been anything other than the Southern Ocean. The Pacific coast was a 1000km away to the east towards Sydney, and the Indian Ocean was what you saw when the sunset over Perth to the Far West.

[dhx]

If you're on the Great Ocean Road west of Cape Otway and can see the water, the water is internationally recognised as "Great Australian Bight". If you're on the Great Ocean Road to the east of Cape Otway, the water you see is internationally recognised as "Bass Strait". See sections 62, 62A and 63 of [1] for the detailed definitions of limits.

[1] https://iho.int/uploads/user/pubs/standards/s-23/S-23_Ed3_19...

[dwd]

Can't agree more, as a Warrnambool native* there nothing barmy or Indian about that Sou'Westerly wind that never stops blowing down that way.

*Currently living on the Pacific coast - or is it the Coral Sea?

[EdwardDiego]

That's interesting to me as a Kiwi, because to me the Southern Ocean is a rather rough piece of water south of the subantarctic islands.

Although I've never stared south from the Great Australian Bight.

[dhx]

From Waipapa Point[1] on Te Waipounamu, if you were looking west or south-west towards Rakiura, you'd be looking at the "Tasman Sea". Otherwise the waters are the "South Pacific Ocean". See sections 61 and 63 of [1] for more detail.

[1] https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/1074610331

[2] https://iho.int/uploads/user/pubs/standards/s-23/S-23_Ed3_19...

[postingawayonhn]

Yeah as a fellow Kiwi (living in Australia) I've always considered the Southern Ocean to start somewhere around the subantarctic islands (Auckland Island, Campbell Island, and Macquarie Island) below NZ.

[dhx]

Some more information for anyone interested:

The latest IHO standard S-23 is edition 3 from 1953 [1] and identifies the waters around Antarctica as either the South Pacific Ocean, Indian Ocean or South Atlantic Ocean. Boundaries between the three oceans in the vicinity of Antarctica are approximately [2] the lines south of Cape Agulhas (southern point of the African continent), South East Cape (southern point of Tasmania, Australia) and Cape Horn (southern point of the South American continent).

In addition to the political disputes of more modern times about names and geographic limits, there have historically been problems with determining the real geographic location referred to in historical maps, and problems with naming of points in maps. The first point of the Australian mainland which the Captain James Cook expedition attempted to name as "Point Hicks" was found by later navigators to be over 20km offshore from the mainland in the middle of the ocean[3]. The government in 1970 in celebration of the bicentenary of the Captain James Cook expedition to Australia decided to rename "Cape Everard" to "Point Hicks".

[1] https://iho.int/uploads/user/pubs/standards/s-23/S-23_Ed3_19...

[2] The standard notes that Argentina and Chile were in dispute regarding the southwest limit of the South Atlantic Ocean and eastern limit of the South Pacific Ocean.

[3] https://www.anps.org.au/upload/Sept_2013.pdf