Trump sets sights on Pacific seafloor near the Marianas Trench

The Trump administration is expanding its deep-sea mining ambitions to the region around the Mariana Trench in the Western Pacific and nearly doubling the proposed seabed mining area around American Samoa from 18 million acres to 33 million acres, an area larger than that of Peru.

The move ignores the unified opposition of indigenous leaders in American Samoa, who imposed a moratorium on seabed mining last year. Pulaali’i Gov. Nikolao Pula has asked the Trump administration not to proceed without the territory’s consent, but the federal government is considering an environmental assessment. “Our fisheries are essential to food security, recreation and the perpetuation of our Samoan culture,” Nathan Ilaoa, director of American Samoa’s Department of Marine and Wildlife Resources, told the Samoa News last week. Tuna represents 99.5 percent of the territory’s exports.

In a press release, Acting Director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or BOEM, Matt Giacona, said the minerals could help U.S. industry and defense. “These resources are critical to ensuring that the United States is not dependent on China and other countries for its critical mineral needs,” he said. In April, the Trump administration issued an executive order aimed at accelerating offshore mining, despite international opposition and widespread concern among scientists that little is known about the deep sea ecosystem and the impacts mining could have on it.

This is the first time the Trump administration has expressed interest in mining the waters around the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory made up of 14 islands in the Mariana archipelago in the western Pacific. The southernmost island of the archipelago is Guam, a separate US territory. It is the last of four areas of the Pacific that the Trump administration has sought to open to mining since April, including the waters surrounding the Cook Islands and the Clarion-Klipperton area, a mineral-rich area south of Hawaii.

Nearly 100 square miles of the waters surrounding the Marianas Archipelago are part of the Marianas Trench National Marine Monument. “These reefs and waters are among the most biologically diverse in the Western Pacific and include some of the greatest diversity of seamount and hydrothermal vent life ever discovered,” reads the monument’s description on the NOAA website. “It has many secrets to reveal and many potentially valuable lessons that can benefit the rest of the world.” The BOEM release does not clearly indicate where mining might take place in relation to the monument.

The federal government has not yet identified where exactly mining would take place in the Commonwealth’s surrounding waters, but is opening to public comment today, November 12, and for the next four weeks. “The (request for contribution) is not a decision to sell a lease, but rather invites and encourages territorial and local governments, Indigenous communities, industry, ocean users and the public,” BOEM said. The Commonwealth is home to approximately 44,000 residents, including indigenous Chamorro and Carolinian peoples.

The update from the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management this week comes just days after University of Hawaii researchers concluded that deep-sea mining could harm zooplankton, the tiny sea creatures that are an integral part of the ocean food web. Researchers discovered that a huge sediment plume stretching hundreds of miles, created by mining operations, was obscuring the ocean. The zooplankton then fed on particles contained in the sediment which proved to be 10 to 100 times less nutritious than their usual food. “Because this is such a tightly knit community food web, it will have bottom-up impacts where the zooplankton will starve, then the micronekton (that eat them) will starve and that community could collapse,” said Michael Dowd, lead author of the report.

Dowd initially chose to study the waters at a depth of 1,250 feet because that is where The Metals Company planned to discharge its sediment. The company has since decided to do it at a lower depth, 2,000 feet below sea level, in part because of data revealing there were fewer zooplankton there and said concerns about zooplankton at lower depths were overblown. Dowd said the lack of such in-depth studies is not reassuring. “We really don’t know what that deeper community looks like,” he said.

In the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, where a drop in tourism has triggered a prolonged economic downturn this year, leading to the closure of hotels and businesses, news of possible deep-sea mining has sparked both concern and interest. “Success will depend on careful environmental management, respect for local and indigenous interests, and transparent, science-based decision-making to ensure development aligns with national and regional priorities,” Floyd Masga, head of the local Coastal and Environmental Quality Office, told Marianas Press.