If that is right, more is at stake in the Dutch courtroom than Bolivia's hankering for beachfront property.The struggle has its origin in the exploitation of nitrates, used for fertiliser and to make saltpetre for the manufacture of gunpowder, in the Bolivian littoral, whose sparse population was mainly Chilean.
It lost its littoral to Chile in a 19th-century war and has been trying to recover a piece of it almost ever since.On May 4th Bolivia's quest entered a new phase when the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague began hearings on its demand for Chile to grant it "sovereign access to the sea", ie, territory that would reconnect it to the Pacific Ocean.
But the thought of using it to recharge aquifers let alone to pipe it direct to people's taps is currently more than Angelenos can stomach.Yet, an hour's drive to the south, water officials in Orange County recently opened a $480m recycling plant for recharging local aquifers and injecting the product into the littoral water table to prevent further incursion of seawater.
Until recently, Iran and Russia were at one in trying to prevent America from dominating the distribution of Caspian oil and gas; they had similar ideas, too, on how to divide the Caspian between the five littoral states.
Now, Russia may be switching sides, or, at least, leaving Iran's.During last month's summit of littoral states, Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, joined Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan in demanding that Iran accept a much smaller slice of seabed than it claims.
Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan are trying to do the same.Iran, excluded from international deals by American pressure to keep the Islamic republic isolated, is trying, against all odds, to persuade the others that some version of the old legal arrangements between itself and the Soviet Union should be resurrected and the sea's resources shared by the five littoral states.
And America and China, along with some of the South-East Asian littoral states, argued over the sea.
Indeed before the age of tourism not many littoral folk learned to swim; the risk of drowning was too high.Cross-fertilisation between cultures and religions did, of course, take place, often despite the efforts of secular and religious leaders to stop it, or to ensure that influence only flowed one way.
China is playing an elaborately dangerous game of "chicken" around its littoral with its neighbours.
Previously Russia had argued that the five littoral states should hold much of the seabed and mineral reserves in common, dividing up only a band of coastal waters for exploiting on a national basis.Iran had been the main backer of the Russian argument for shared jurisdiction.
As he and his colleagues show in a paper posted on arXiv, an online repository, littoral islands may actually exacerbate, rather than diminish, the effects of these waves.Anecdotal evidence for this counterintuitive assertion comes from (mercifully rare) episodes where the same tsunami has battered different types of coastal topography.
