The UP Marine Science Institute  (MSI) surveyed Benham Rise on the east of Luzon just days after the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS) declared this 13-million hectare submarine plateau as Official Philippine Territory.

MSI, along with collaborators from the University of Hawaii, the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology, were on their three-week research cruise (April 24-May 12, 2012) aboard the Scripps Institution of Oceanography-operated research vessel R/V Roger Revelle when they got word of the UN Declaration.

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