OceanGate operated in ‘lawless’ high seas. Others do, too.

A dive in international waters. A submersible transported on a Canadian ship. A subsidiary company registered in the Bahamas.

OceanGate, the owner of the submersible that imploded attempting to visit wreckage from the Titanic – killing all on board – appears to have gone to great lengths to operate in a legal gray zone, slipping between the cracks of domestic and international law. But one need not go far to find vessels navigating uncharted regulatory waters on the open ocean.

“The high seas are lawless,” said Sally Yozel, who previously served as the director of policy at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Experts said international waters, which cover roughly half the planet and make up two-thirds of the ocean, suffer from patchwork regulation and inconsistent enforcement, a challenge that can give rise to human rights abuses, criminal acts and environmental harms.

In OceanGate’s case, the American-made Titan submersible dove into international waters from a Canadian ship, Polar Prince, an arrangement that OceanGate took to mean the submersible did not need to register with a country or otherwise follow rules that apply to vessels.

Salvatore Mercogliano, a maritime historian with Campbell (North Carolina) University, compared the submersible to a recreational boat: “If you’re driving your truck, and you’ve got a trailer with a boat on the back, and the police stop you, they can inspect the car and the trailer. But not the boat, because the boat is cargo, and it doesn’t become a vehicle until you stick it in the water.

“Once you get 12 miles out,” Mercogliano added, referring to the outer limit of territorial sea, “there’s no international boat police that shows up.”

Thomas Schoenbaum, a University of Washington law professor and maritime law expert, added that Stockton Rush, the OceanGate CEO who died on the Titan, led both the Washington-based OceanGate and OceanGate Expeditions, a subsidiary company based in the Bahamas that led the Titanic dives.

“It does strike one as an attempt to avoid regulation,” Schoenbaum said.

The multinational search for the Titan and its five passengers ended Thursday after the U.S. Coast Guard announced pieces of the missing submersible had been found, evidence of a “catastrophic implosion” that left no survivors.

There have long been calls for better regulation of the high seas, but this comes amid a “dizzying array” of agreements, conventions and regional bodies to manage the seas. This includes the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which established rules governing the use of oceans and their resources, and the International Maritime Organization, an agency of the U.N. that regulates shipping.

Taken together, Nichola Clark, the officer for ocean governance at The Pew Charitable Trusts, said, these constitute a “patchwork system” of governance. She said some rules are not enforced and other areas, such as the biodiversity that a new U.N. treaty seeks to regulate, are not covered at all.

Clark said the Monday adoption of the High Seas Treaty is an important upcoming set of protections. The treaty – also known as the BBNJ, which stands for biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction – has been nearly two decades in the making and will enter into force after 60 parties ratify it, which proponents hope could happen by June 2025.

Yozel, who directs the environmental security program at the Stimson Center in Washington, D.C., said of the treaty, “We need a multilateral, international effort to protect our oceans. This is a big first step.”

Yozel said she is particularly concerned about illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing in the high seas, which can severely deplete fish populations and enable human rights abuses, including human trafficking.

The U.N. estimates that illegal fishing is responsible for the loss of up to 26 million tonnes of fish and $23 billion annually. Putting a halt to this plunder is difficult: Finding an illegal fishing boat in the ocean is akin to searching for a needle in a haystack, and researchers are turning to increasingly high-tech strategies to spot criminal behavior.

“They are ravaging the seas,” Yozel said. “It’s upending the economic and food security of coastal communities.”

Deep-sea mining, the process of extracting valuable metals such as gold, cobalt and zinc from the seabed, is also coming under scrutiny.

Unlike fishing, the challenge is not mining conducted without permission, said Julian Jackson, senior manager of ocean governance at Pew. (The expense of the mining is likely too high.) Instead, he said there is a “legal lacuna” surrounding the seabed resource extraction.

He said the U.N.-chartered International Seabed Authority is “hamstrung” after the Pacific Island nation Nauru invoked a legal loophole that could allow mining before the authority finalizes regulations. He anticipates one company will seek a license to exploit minerals later this year.

Leaders of the Metals Company, the firm partnering with Nauru on mining the sea floor, say its proposal is preferable to extracting rare minerals from rainforests and other fragile habitats on land.

Jackson, however, said a moratorium is needed on mining, along with further study to better understand its potential impact on the underwater ecosystem and the carbon cycle.

“What keeps me awake at night is the fact that we’re dealing with a very delicate environment that takes a long time to recover, and anything we do to this environment is probably near permanent in terms of human time scales,” he said.

The implosion of the Titan could possibly trigger increased regulation of the high seas, experts said – at least when it comes to submersibles. Mercogliano pointed to the changes in maritime law after the sinking of the Titanic, including the first International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea.

“Does the sinking of the Titan get you new regulations on submersibles?” he asked. “Perhaps.”