The Ghost of the Guano Islands Act

While headlines focus on the chaos in Congress and the next AI startup IPO, something far more consequential just happened — and almost no one noticed.

"History is written by the ones who claim the map" Howard Zinn

In 1856, the United States Congress passed a peculiar but consequential law: the Guano Islands Act. Under its provisions, American citizens were authorized to claim any unoccupied, unclaimed island anywhere in the world for the United States—so long as it contained deposits of guano, the nitrogen-rich bird waste prized for use in fertilizer and gunpowder.

Over the next few decades, more than 100 remote islands, atolls, and reefs were absorbed into the expanding American sphere—from the Caribbean to the central Pacific. Many were never formally contested. A few, like Baker and Howland Islands, remain U.S. territories to this day. The logic was simple: if no one else had laid claim, and it held strategic or economic value, the U.S. would take it—lawfully, and unilaterally.

This is still the law of the land and the strategy hasn’t changed much. Only the terrain has.

In December 2023, the U.S. quietly announced the largest expansion of its territory in decades—adding over 1 million square kilometers to its Extended Continental Shelf (ECS). This newly claimed seabed territory, larger than Texas and California combined, stretches beyond the nation’s 200-nautical-mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) and includes portions of the Arctic, Bering Sea, Gulf of Mexico, Atlantic, and Pacific oceans.

Far from being a symbolic act of cartography, this expansion is a calculated assertion of rights over enormous untapped energy and mineral resources—and a strategic positioning move in an era of resurging great-power competition.

Like the Guano Islands Act, the ECS expansion is rooted in a legal framework designed to maximize U.S. access to resources in contested, often overlooked spaces. It was not negotiated in a multinational forum. The U.S. did not ask for UN approval. It mapped, measured, and declared.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the ECS territories contain:

• 68.79 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil

• 229.03 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered, technically recoverable natural gas

To put this in perspective, that’s more oil than the current proven reserves of countries like Brazil or Mexico. It would place the United States among the top five oil reserve holders globally—if developed. The natural gas potential exceeds the proven reserves of Qatar, a global LNG leader.

But hydrocarbons are just the beginning.