Authorities of the National Commission on the Outer Limit of the Continental Shelf (COPLA in the Spanish acronym) and the Argentine Mining Geological Service (SEGEMAR in the Spanish acronym) signed an Interinstitutional Agreement that will contribute to the dissemination and consolidation of the outer limit of the Argentine Continental Shelf, as well as to greater knowledge of the geology of our continental margin from the data provided by both organisms from different sources.
The agreement was signed on September 15 at the headquarters of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs by the Secretary of the Malvinas, Antarctica and South Atlantic, Daniel Filmus, who is also head of COPLA, and the president of SEGEMAR, Eduardo Zappettini.
Since the beginning of its activities in 1997, COPLA has counted on the collaboration of scientists from SEGEMAR and the National Commission of the Geological Chart (Law 24,224) for the geological report that was part of the Argentine presentation of the outer limit of the continental shelf at the United Nations and before the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS). In addition to the contribution of its scientists, SEGEMAR publicly stated in 2009 and 2016 its support for the work carried out by COPLA for the demarcation of the outer limit of the continental shelf and highlighted the unpublished and valuable geological information obtained from the continental margin.
Last August, the National Congress unanimously passed the law to demarcate the outer limit of the continental shelf beyond 200 miles, which is the concrete result of a State policy that Argentina has been developing uninterruptedly for more than two decades, since the creation of COPLA.
The agreement will allow the two institutions to continue cooperating and making contributions on issues of mutual interest. In this way, public geological-geophysical information on the Argentine Continental Shelf held by COPLA may be incorporated into SEGEMAR's Geo-Environmental Mining Information System (SIGAM in the Spanish acronym), helping to comply with Law 24,224, which in its article 1 provides “the execution of the regular and systematic geological mapping of the continental, insular, underwater platform and Antarctic territory of the Argentine Republic at different scales”.
COPLA is an inter-ministerial commission, chaired by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Trade and Worship, and made up of a member of the Naval Hydrography Service and a member of the Ministry of Economy.
SEGEMAR is the product of the integration of different organisms of the National State. Since its creation in 1996 as a decentralized entity, it has been responsible for generating geological-mining, territorial, technological and environmental information.
