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China’s Sand Dredgers Are Eating Into Taiwan, Vietnam, Philippines: US Coast Guard Should Step Up
Commentary
China’s sand dredgers have destroyed thousands of square kilometers of ocean floor in order to build sand islands on which they put military runways and docking facilities for submarines and aircraft carriers. The construction of a single such Chinese island, Mischief Reef (5.6 square kilometers) on Philippine maritime territory, impacted 1,200 square kilometers with plumes of sediment that smothered life on the ocean floor. This implies that the approximately 12.9 square kilometers that China created in the exclusive economic zones (EEZ) of the Philippines and Vietnam since 2013 impacted approximately 2,785 square kilometers of ocean floor.