Saving Seafood

CNMI community pushes back on seabed mining as comment period deadline looms

December 8, 2025 — Saipan residents packed an amphitheater last week to voice concerns about deep-sea mining plans off the Marianas, with local leaders warning the federal government is steamrolling territories without adequate input or financial benefit.

A Dec. 3 forum at American Memorial Park drew community members as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s 30-day comment period on a request for information, or RFI,  nears its Friday deadline. The meeting revealed deep skepticism about the process and mounting frustration over territorial sovereignty.

“This is not self-government where people will just come in and dictate what they’re going to do to your resources,” said Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands Rep. Vincent “Kobre” Aldan, who chairs the House Committee on Public Utilities, Transportation, and Communications. “Self-government is very powerful. That’s the reason why we negotiated.”

Aldan pointed to the U.S. Constitution’s Territorial Clause as the legal foundation allowing the federal government to act unilaterally in territorial waters. He urged Pacific islanders to unite in challenging the provision, which grants Congress broad authority over U.S. territories.

“Can we beat it? Yes, we can. How? By numbers,” Aldan said. “If we can work together with our territorial brothers and sisters, not just here in the Pacific, but also in the Caribbean, and by numbers, sign a petition, get a resolution going, and send it up to the U.S. Congress, then they’ll listen.”

The forum brought together marine scientists, traditional navigators, economists, and government officials to discuss the proposed mining area east of the Mariana Trench Marine National Monument. The site sits about 128 nautical miles from Saipan in federal waters beyond the CNMI’s three-mile territorial boundary.

Governors David Apatang of the CNMI and Lou Leon Guerrero of Guam have jointly requested a 120-day extension to the comment period, which had not been granted as of Monday, when the BOEM RFI docket page at regulations.gov showed 224 comments received.

Sheila Babauta, chair of Friends of the Mariana Trench, told The Guam Daily Post in an interview last week that her organization opposes the RFI and supports the extension request. She noted the document contains an error describing the proposed area as west of the trench when it’s actually to the east.

Read the full article at The Guam Daily Post

Environmental Investing Frenzy Stretches Meaning of ‘Green’

June 25, 2021 — The first time Gerard Barron tried to mine the sea floor, the company he backed lost a half-billion dollars of investor money, got crosswise with a South Pacific government, destroyed sensitive seabed habitat and ultimately went broke. Now he’s trying again, but with a twist: Mr. Barron is positioning his new seabed mining venture, The Metals Company, as green, to capitalize on a surge of environmentally minded investment.

TMC is set to receive nearly $600 million in investor cash in a deal slated to take the company public in July. If successful, that would value TMC at $2.9 billion—more than any mining company ever to go public in the U.S. with no revenue.

“We were positioning this incorrectly as a big mining, deep-sea mining project, which it was,” says Mr. Barron, who says the metallic nodules he hopes to bring up are crucial to building electric-vehicle batteries. “But it wasn’t the way that we were going to garner support from investors to make this industry a reality.”

Green investing has grown so fast that there is a flood of money chasing a limited number of viable companies that produce renewable energy, electric cars and the like.

Read the full story at The Wall Street Journal

Mining’s new frontier: Pacific nations caught in the rush for deep-sea riches

June 24, 2021 — Travel thousands of metres below the surface of the ocean, and you reach the seabed. Pitch black and quiet, it is largely unexplored, untouched, unknown.

What is known is extraordinary. The landscape at the bottom of the sea is as varied as the earth surface: 4,000m (13,000ft) down, abyssal plains stretch for miles like deserts; there are trenches large enough to swallow the Earth’s largest mountains; venting chimneys rise in towers like underwater cities; seamounts climb thousands of metres. Hot thermal vents – believed by some to be the places where all life on Earth started – gush highly acidic water at temperatures of up to 400C, drawing in an array of creatures.

So little is known about what happens this far under the sea that in the 25 years following the discovery of the hydrothermal vents, an average of two new vent species are discovered every month. They include the yeti crab, a ghostly white crustacean with silky-blonde bristles on its claws that give it a resemblance to the Abominable snowman. Others discovered in the last 20 years include the beaked whale and the Greenland shark, which dives to around 1,200m and has a lifespan of close to 400 years, making it one of the world’s longest-living organisms.

“Every time you go down into the deep, you see something incredible and often new,” says Diva Amon, a deep sea biologist and fellow at the Natural History Museum in London who has undertaken 15 deep sea expeditions.

“There’s a bone-eating worm called Osedax, which lives on the bones of dead whales in the deep … Another special one was … an anemone whose tentacles were 8ft long.”

Read the full story at The Guardian

Washington Governor Inslee Signs Bill Protecting Marine Waters From Seabed Mining

May 4, 2021 — The marine waters off the coast of Washington face an overwhelming number of threats, including industrialization, pollution, warming waters, ocean acidification, and more. Now it appears that the ecosystem and wildlife there will get a reprieve from at least one potential hazard: Governor Jay Inslee (D) signed bipartisan legislation today prohibiting seabed mining for hard minerals, including precious metals, metal-rich sands, and gemstones, within 3 miles of Washington shores. This farsighted measure, introduced Jan. 12 by Democratic state Senators Kevin Van De Wege and Christine Rolfes, protects commercial and recreational fisheries, marine wildlife, and the communities and Tribal Nations that depend on them from the damage such mineral extraction would inflict. The Pew Charitable Trusts thanks the Washington Legislature and Gov. Inslee for their precautionary approach to the issue.

Seabed mining could harm sensitive habitats, for example from dredges destroying corals and sponges or sediment plumes from mining machines injuring salmon and other species. This could in turn hurt communities that depend on fishing, tourism, and cultural resources.

This is not a theoretical problem. The hard minerals found in Washington’s nearshore waters have attracted interest from mining companies for decades. The state Department of Natural Resources (DNR) has issued exploration and mining leases for iron- and titanium-rich black sands in several areas at the mouth of the Columbia River, including one in the 1960s for a project that spurred construction of a concentrating plant. DNR issued a similar seabed mining lease in the 1980s for an operation off the Long Beach Peninsula that also failed to get off the ground.

Read the full story at Pew Charitable Trusts

Deep-seabed mining lastingly disrupts the seafloor food web

October 9, 2020 — The deep sea is far away and hard to envision. If imagined, it seems like a cold and hostile place. However, this remote habitat is directly connected to our lives, as it forms an important part of the global carbon cycle. Also, the deep seafloor is, in many places, covered with polymetallic nodules and crusts that arouse economic interest. There is a lack of clear standards to regulate their mining and set binding thresholds for the impact on the organisms living in affected areas.

Mining can reduce microbial carbon cycling, while animals are less affected

An international team of scientists around Tanja Stratmann from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, and Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and Daniëlle de Jonge from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, has investigated the food web of the  to see how it is affected by disturbances such as those caused by  activities.

For this, the scientists traveled to the so-called DISCOL area in the tropical East Pacific, about 3000 kilometers off the coast of Peru. Back in 1989, German researchers had simulated mining-related disturbances in this manganese nodule field, 4000 meters under the surface of the ocean, by plowing a 3.5 km wide area of seabed with a plow-harrow. “Even 26 years after the disturbance, the plow tracks are still there”, Stratmann described the site. Previous studies had shown that microbial abundance and density had undergone lasting changes in this area. “Now we wanted to find out what that meant for carbon cycling and the food web of this deep ocean habitat.”

Read the full story at PHYS.org