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Deep-sea mining may irreparably harm ocean ecosystems before we even have a chance to study these mysterious environments. It’s also a threat to the livelihood and cultural and spiritual ways of life for Indigenous peoples around the world. That's why the Center has taken a lead role in opposing it. With the Trump administration aggressively pushing to begin deep-sea mining in both U.S. and international waters, the time to fight back is now.
The Center is opposing deep-sea mining projects proposed for international waters in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone of the Pacific Ocean between Hawai‘i and Mexico, as well as proposed domestic projects off the coasts of Alaska, American Samoa, and Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. Prospecting corporations have long coveted the precious rare-earth metals embedded in the ocean floor that could be used for electronics and military weapons systems. Those metals include nickel, copper, cobalt, manganese, zinc, and gold.
In April 2025 the Trump administration issued an executive order aimed at accelerating deep-sea mining. Previously companies haven't been willing to heavily invest in such a speculative and costly undertaking, since deep-sea mining has never been done before and studies suggest it’s not economically viable. But the recent combination of the Trump administration’s backing and steep increases in the value of precious metals has triggered an aggressive push to mine the deep ocean floor.
Life in the deep sea is still an enigmatic realm that scientists have only begun to investigate. They worry that this new gold rush will do untold damage to the ocean's food web and other complex natural systems. What mountaintop-removal coal mining has done to Appalachia, deep-sea mining has the potential to do to our oceans — in short, severe and irreversible damage. It may also affect these ecosystems and biodiversity in ways scientists don't yet fully understand.
Mining companies plan to use large, robotic machines to excavate the ocean floor, similarly to how strip-mining is done on land. Excavated materials are pumped up to a ship while wastewater and debris are dumped into the ocean, forming large sediment clouds underwater. The slurry is then loaded onto barges and shipped to onshore processing facilities.
Deep-sea mining operations will likely harm sensitive underwater ecosystems. Marine life threatened by the projects we're challenging include endangered sea turtles (loggerhead, green, leatherback, hawksbill, olive ridley, and flatback sea turtles), sharks (grey reef, tiger, great hammerhead, and whitetip reef sharks), tuna (frigate, mackerel, dog-tooth, yellowfin, albacore, and bigeye tuna), cetaceans (pygmy killer whales, sperm whales, spinner dolphins, and Cuvier's beaked whales), and marine birds (Beck's petrels and Heinroth's shearwaters). The seafloor at the mining sites could be wiped clean of life and natural contours, directly devastating clams, mussels, corals, tubeworms, snails, xenophyophores, the larval supply, and more.
The regulatory oversight of these operations is both sparce and complex. The International Seabed Authority, created through the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, is going through a process to develop environmental regulations for deep-sea mining in international waters. The United States isn’t a member of the International Seabed Authority — instead it purports to issue its own permits for deep-sea mining in international waters through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration via a domestic law, the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act. In its rush to mine the seabed, the United States is also fast-tracking leases to mine federal waters under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act.
After President Donald Trump’s 2025 deep-sea mining executive o rder, there’s been a flood of deep-sea mining proposals. The Metals Company has proposed mining more than 45 million acres of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone of the Pacific Ocean. Impossible Metals wants to mine 18 million acres of ocean floor near American Samoa, an area bordering a national marine sanctuary with imperiled corals, and another 35 million acres east of Guam and the Mariana Islands, adjacent to Mariana Trench Marine National Monument. The Trump administration is accelerating leasing federal waters for seabed mining in federal waters, including in the Pacific and off Alaska.
Global resistance to deep-sea mining is growing. Forty nations have called for a moratorium, and communities across the Pacific are rising up to protect the ocean. The Center is taking a leading role in this resistance, engaging in legal action, submitting technical comments in permitting processes, raising awareness through the media about the harms of deep-sea mining, and mobilizing public support to stop these destructive projects before they start.
