China has produced a new digital bathymetric model of the South China Sea which stretches past Singapore, and near the south-west end of Borneo – Map should concern Malaysia and Indonesia

 by Ganesh Sahathevan 

A new digital bathymetric model of the South China Sea based on the subregional fusion of seven global seafloor topography products

In 2020 researchers at the Jiangsu Provincial Key Laboratory of Geographic Information Science and Technology,Nanjing University, Nanjing ,China produced what they claimed is a new digital bathymetric model of the South China Sea ( see above)

The geographic extent of the area of interst ranged from 0.30°S to 23.80°N and 99.17°E to 121.28°E, which is past Singapore and near the south-west end of Borneo.

Readers will note that the Nine Dash Line and new Ten Dash Line (see map below)  mirrors approximately the littoral  sections of the bathymetric map

See Power Point 

Identifying and naming seabed structures is like any other exercise in mapping since at least 1492 . Here for example note how the disputed Paracel Islands sits behind he Zhongsa and Zhongjian Massif . It is unclear if the massifs were discovered by China, but there does not appear to have been any challenge or alternative name provided
It should be noted that the maps above  has been extracted from an article by researchers at the Barcelona Center for Subsurface Imaging, indicating that non-Chinese researchers are not averse to using Chinese names to identify features in that area of interest. 


In light of the above the new bathymetric map could well further justify China's claims to the South China Sea, which now includes an extended section of the Bornean coast shared by Malaysia and Indonesia.

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