The federal government has revealed plans to sell the rights to mine the seafloor in the deep water off American Samoa, seventy nautical miles northeast of Rose Atoll, where Samoan families have long tracked sea turtles they believe to be ancestral. November 19 is the date of the sale. The deep seafloor has never been mined for profit anywhere on Earth. With a schedule of about eighteen months from sale to possible operation, the United States is aiming to be the first.
The first lawsuit against deep-sea mining in American waters was filed on August 18 by Earthjustice. The National Marine Fisheries Service’s conclusion that the proposed leasing is “not likely to adversely affect” species protected by the Endangered Species Act is the subject of the lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court of Hawaii on behalf of Fa’asao Amerika Samoa and the Conservation Council for Hawai’i.
The plaintiffs contend that the agency’s biological evaluation primarily addressed initial activities, such as seafloor sampling and sonar scans, and completely ignored the potential effects of large-scale mining on the vulnerable corals, sea turtles, and endangered whales that rely on those waters. The possible impact extends beyond the immediate lease area since some of those creatures travel via Hawaiian waters.
NOAA established the Marine Minerals Administration to oversee this procedure, and it has made rapid progress. The presence of polymetallic nodules, the potato-sized rocks rich in nickel, cobalt, manganese, and copper that have drawn mining interests to the Pacific bottom, was confirmed by a $20 million hydrographic survey covering more than 30,000 square nautical miles. The location of the minerals is described by that survey. Critics contend that it lacks an environmental impact assessment suitable for the commercial-scale extraction that lease auctions are intended to facilitate. The administration suggested a second lease sale of 69 million acres off the Mariana Islands and Guam, set for December 16, one week after the American Samoa lawsuit was filed.
It really is difficult to imagine the scope of what is being suggested. The American Samoa region alone is larger than Pennsylvania, spanning over 31 million acres. That is more than doubled by the Mariana Islands proposal. The two lease regions together occupy about 100 million acres of the Pacific bottom of the United States. No commercial seabed mining enterprise has ever been created anywhere in the world.
Not one. Two dozen contractors have received exploration licenses from the International Seabed Authority, the UN agency in charge of international waters, but commercial extraction has not been approved. Under a domestic statute from 1980 that was created before anyone had the technology to actually try deep-sea mining, the United States, which has not joined the UN Convention on the statute of the Sea, is moving completely outside of that framework.
Matt Giacona, the acting head of the Marine Minerals government, presented the lease auctions in language that the government has regularly used: minimizing reliance on foreign supply chains, national security, and essential minerals. These are not baseless claims; the United States imports the majority of its supplies, and supply chains for nickel and cobalt are actually constrained. However, the shift from “we need these minerals” to “we should mine the Pacific seabed on a fast-tracked timeline without adequate environmental review” is substantial, and the scientific community has been voicing concerns about it more and more loudly.
According to a frequently referenced study, large-scale deep-sea mining might harm biodiversity up to 25 times more than comparable land-based mining. The Earthjustice complaint contends that the government failed to account for what it means in exact, tangible terms for the American Samoa ecosystem prior to setting the auction date.
The U.S. District Court in Hawaii’s decision and the speed at which it proceeds will determine whether or not the November auction takes forward. That is truly ambiguous. The legal challenge coincides with comment periods for the governors of American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands, and the Samoan governor’s response has been keenly monitored. The timetable being compressed here gives the impression that decisions with decades-long ramifications are being made on a schedule more appropriate for a regular lease auction than for the first commercial exploitation of a marine environment that no one has thoroughly investigated.
