An environmental group is suing to prevent a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin from prospecting for deep sea minerals on the ocean floor between Hawaii and Mexico.
The lawsuit against the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration alleges the federal agency failed to examine environmental impacts before renewing exploratory permits. The suit, filed May 13 by the Center for Biological Diversity, targets just two of 15 permits for exploration in the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone, which starts 500 miles southeast of Hawaii and extends almost to the coast of Central America.
“Deep sea mining should be stopped, and this lawsuit aims to compel the government to look at the environmental risks before it leaps into this new frontier,” said Emily Jeffers, the attorney who filed the suit in Washington, D.C.
At issue are two licenses granted in 1980 and renewed in 2012. The licenses are now held by OMCO Seabed Exploration, a subsidiary of the defense contractor Lockheed. But NOAA erred in renewing the permits in 2012 because it failed to properly assess and document potential environmental impacts, Jeffers argues.
NOAA officials declined to comment because the matter is in litigation.
Most of the exploratory permits have been issued to various foreign mining interests by the International Seabed Authority and do not fall under U.S. jurisdiction. Long a bone of contention for environmental groups, the search for undersea wealth is raising red flags again as the ISA, based in Kingston, Jamaica, pushes ahead this summer with creating rules for exploiting areas like the Clarion-Clipperton Zone.
“The rush to strip-mine the deep-ocean floor threatens to damage mysterious underwater ecosystems,” Jeffers said. “If we aren’t careful, this new gold rush could do irreparable harm to the basic building blocks of life.”
The zone — defined by two mountainous fractures in the Earth’s crust running roughly east and west — is believed to hold potentially hundreds of billions of dollars worth of copper, nickel, manganese, cobalt and rare earth elements in the form of baseball-sized nodules. Scientists have been aware of the deposits for decades, but technologies and demand weren’t strong enough to make deep sea mining add up from an economic perspective.
The push is fueled now by a spike in worldwide demand for the minerals and a dwindling of land-based sources. Deep sea robotic mining equipment is under development and has been advanced recently by gains in deep ocean oil drilling technology.
The effects of dredging up the ore are unknown and potentially damaging to sea life in the region and beyond, watchdogs contend. Also of concern to environmentalists is an area off Papua New Guinea, dubbed Solwara 1, where they say mining efforts are moving ahead before their effects can be fully studied.
But Craig Smith, a University of Hawaii oceanographer and sea floor expert, said its unlikely NOAA will jump very far into permitting sea floor mining in international waters. The ISA, however, will likely have regulations and environmental plans for international seafloor exploitation in place within the next several years, he said.
“The mining in international waters is probably five to 10 years away, but it could be less,” he said in an email. “We are hoping to have a policy piece published in Science Magazine in the next few weeks pushing for the ISA to set up strategic environmental management plans, including networks of protected areas, before any more exploration claims are granted. In some parts of the deep sea, exploration claims are extensive enough to be already interfering with the set up effective marine protected area networks.”
