As countries race to erect drilling rigs and send oil exploration vessels to comb the seabed, conflicting maritime claims are helping to fuel a naval arms race.
In 1916, he maintained naval aircraft during the Battle of Jutland, the conflict's greatest sea battle, and the following year he was transferred to the western front in time for the last Ypres offensive.
The sea and conflict have are in his bloodlines.
Israeli Jews swim in a sea of conflicting ideas about who they should be.
But this arrangement creates close cooperation set amid a sea of conflicts.
Regional powers are swimming around each other, cautiously and nervously, jockeying to assert their own strength but trying to avoid the kind of sea-based conflict that many observers fear is looming.
So why should anyone care?As wars of liberation raged around it in the 1980s, this former British protectorate gained a reputation as an island of peace in a sea of regional conflict.
Sea lions also conflict with fisherman since both depend on the same fish stocks.
Despite the anxiety that China's attempts to dredge sovereignty from the seabed have caused, conflict over these territorial disputes is far from inevitable, said Dr. Jacques deLisle, director of the Asia Program for the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
In his scholarly yet swashbuckling history of that conflict at sea, Robert Massie shows how early hopes of glorious sea battles, shared alike by the people of Britain and of Germany, foundered on the cruel reality of a war of attrition.
Leon Panetta, the US Defence Secretary, has said he is concerned that the territorial dispute between Japan and China over islands in the East China Sea could result in conflict, which would have the potential to draw in other nations.
