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Yes, it’s a rock. But a lot of people want it. Here’s why.

The creatively named island of Rockall sits just northwest of Ireland and south of Iceland in the Atlantic Ocean, and unless you to listen to BBC shipping forecasts, it’s a safe bet you’ve never heard of it. At about 83 feet wide and 100 feet long, it’s an unremarkable hunk of stone — the tip of a much larger underwater mountain — and has been called “the smallest isolated rock, or the most isolated small rock (both ways will do), in the oceans of the world.”

Rockall is a dull, dreary, uninhabitable place, and the only remotely interesting thing about it is that it may — or may not — be sitting on a huge reserve of oil and natural gas.

In 1955, the Brits planted a Union Jack there and claimed it as their own, and 18 years later passed the Island of Rockall Act to drive home the point. But it’s closer to Ireland’s mainland than it is to Britain’s, and Denmark and Iceland claim rights to the underwater continental shelf around the island. In May, diplomats from all four countries will meet (for a fourth time) to determine once and for all who owns this barren little rock in the middle of nowhere — and, more importantly, the fishing and oil exploration rights that come with it.

Trivia tidbit: Interestingly, Rockall was once invaded and occupied:

In 1997 the environmentalist organisation Greenpeace occupied the islet for a short time,[36] calling it Waveland, to protest against oil exploration under the authority of the British. Greenpeace declared the island to be a “new Global State”, and offered citizenship to anyone willing to take their pledge of allegiance. The British Government’s response was simply to give them permission to be there, and otherwise ignore them. Indeed, when asked, the Home Office responded that since Rockall was part of the United Kingdom, and since the UK was a free country, Greenpeace were perfectly entitled to be at Rockall.

The project continued until 1999, when the company sponsoring it collapsed and the experiment ended.

Image via Wikipedia.