If he had unlimited resources, Larry Mayer, director of the University of New Hampshire's Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping, would like to map the entire ocean floor. But in an industry where it takes more than $2 million to chart the coast of New Jersey, that's a stretch.

Instead, Mayer and fellow scientists at the center are focused on mapping the Arctic Ocean off the Alaskan coast and other areas that the United States could eventually claim under a United Nations treaty that lets countries extend control to the edge of their continental shelf.

While the task is not as lofty as Mayer's big dream, the significance of the center's work is huge. It could be the foundation of a rewriting of America's boundaries that could add as much as $1.3 trillion in value - if the United States joins the treaty.

Called the Law of the Sea, the treaty allows countries to extend their Exclusive Economic Zones, coastal areas where they control ocean resources, based on the depth and shape of the seafloor and sediment thickness.

Mayer pointed to a map of the United States' current EEZ, set at the standard 200 nautical miles from the coast. Swaths of red painted along the Atlantic coast, the gulfs of Mexico and Alaska, and the Arctic identify areas to where the United States may be able to extend.

"We haven't even looked at the Western Pacific," Mayer said.

But the United States hasn't actually signed the treaty. President Bush supports it, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved it unanimously two years ago. But Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has refused to put it before the full Senate for a vote.

Professor John Norton Moore, director of the Center for Oceans Law and Policy at the University of Virginia School of Law, called the hesitation a "national embarrassment." He called claims that it will threaten U.S. sovereignty and turn much of the oceans over to the United Nations inaccurate. Instead, he said, the Law of the Sea could result in the greatest expansion of U.S. territory since the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.

New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg secured the funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 2000 for the center to start researching those areas affected by the treaty. The agency pays for time spent at sea and provides about $4 million a year to help support the 70-person lab. Gregg's office did not return messages left Thursday and Friday.

Other countries have been working on their application to the United Nations for decades. Japan has been mapping for about 20 years and is spending about $100 million a year, Mayer said.

The UNH center wasn't picked solely because it is in Gregg's backyard. It is considered tops in the country for ocean mapping, and Mayer is viewed as one of the world's leaders in Law of the Sea research, Moore said.

"I think the government itself will shortly be beginning to follow along in his footsteps to get full governmental involvement,"Moore said.

Mayer came to UNH from the University of New Brunswick about five years ago. Of the past 30 years, he has spent a total of six at sea. Treaty or no treaty, the work the center does is important, Mayer said.

"The oceans are really, really poorly mapped," he said. He pulled up images on his laptop of cruise ships perched precariously on rocks off the Alaskan coast, where tourists want to see the receding glaciers up close. The newly exposed stretch of ocean the glaciers have left in their wake is unmapped.

The building that houses the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping is full of sophisticated toys. There's a 20-foot water tank for sonar calibration and a bay of computer screens on which students help Robert Ballard, the discoverer of the Titanic wreckage, process sonar data collected on his latest trip. In a waiting room, a computer screen shows the tidal flows of New Hampshire's Great Bay. Visitors can touch the screen to simulate an oil spill and watch the path it takes. The center is developing a similar screen picturing the world's oceans for an upcoming Smithsonian exhibit.

In one hall, maps show the progression of sonar technology. Older maps show only contour lines of the ocean floor. Until World War II, those were made by dropping a piece of lead tied to a rope to the ocean floor and measuring its length, Mayer said. Single beam sonar was used until the early 1970s, then replaced by fanning, multi-beam sonar.

The challenge then was processing the massive amounts of data the sonar collected. When UNH began using the newer technology, it took about eight hours to process the information that could be gathered in one hour, Mayer said. Now, the center has developed software that can do it in a few minutes. The maps produced can depict ripples in the sand, ocean channels, mines meant to be invisible to early sonar equipment - even starfish on the floor of Portsmouth Harbor.

The maps are colorful and intricate. But, as the center's motto reminds scientists, "it's more than a pretty picture,"Mayer said.

In the case of the Arctic Ocean, the maps are also prospects. There, where the melting polar ice will give way to an unknown but massive amount of frozen gas hydrates and valuable shipping routes, figuring out the Law of the Sea gets particularly complicated. Five countries bordering the ocean will vie for control. Russia has already submitted an application to the United Nations, and Japan will in 2008.

Mayer and his crew have made two trips to the arctic on a 470-foot U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker that costs the center about $30,000 a day. The first expedition was for 10 days to the high arctic, where they found a seamount (an underwater mountain) rising about 3,100 meters from the ocean floor that had never been detected before. The crew named it Healy, after the icebreaker that carried them there.

In 2003, they returned for 20 days. They'll return in September for 30 days.

"Once you go to the Arctic, it's addicting," Mayer said.

Lawyers and politicians will ultimately decide how much of the ocean floor each country is entitled to. It's the scientists' job now to get the best picture possible of what lies beneath the ice, Mayer said.

"There should be no ambiguity about what the true shape of the seafloor is," he said.

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By CHELSEA CONABOY

Monitor staff