The current administration is proposing yet another reckless way of grinding up our planet and turning it into money.
Earlier this year the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM, soon to be Minerals Management Administration or ‘MMA’) received an unsolicited “Request for Information and Interest (RFI) about the possibility of seafloor mining off the coast of Virginia. The requesting company – which remains unnamed, set up a process whereby BOEM will open up 1,769,196 acres (2,764 square miles) of the continental shelf off the Virginia coast for the extraction of Titanium, Zirconium, and Monzonite – rare earth metals used in microchip manufacturing, as well as phosphorites and phosphates, which can be used as soil amendments in industrial agriculture.
The subject area is foundational to the trophic pyramid that makes this area so rich in marine and estuarian life. Immediately adjacent to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay and flanking the crenelated coast that makes the Virginia coast so popular for recreational fishermen, and so profitable to commercial fishing operations.
As I mention in our comments, this area is not just a minerals library, it is habitat. The mining process involves the use of hopper dredges reaching down from the surface, and heavy seafloor excavation equipment which breaks and scoops up enormous amounts of benthic sediment. This will kick up vast amounts of silt and sediment, in an area of dynamic currents and adjacent to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) (also known as the Gulf Stream).
Silt caught in the AMOC will be carried into the Atlantic, sullying the entire water column, and raining down in the benthic sessile metazoan epifauna which don’t really have mechanisms of shedding this non-organic silt. So this little industrial extraction operation will be despoiling potentially millions of acres of the Atlantic seafloor and the water column above it.
Our comments can be found here: https://bit.ly/3SP8j6a
I wish I had sent this newsletter out earlier, because the comment period ends on Saturday August 22 at 11:59 EDT. But should you wish, you still have a little time to lodge your own comments here:
It will be interesting (or terrifying) to see what the Agency will do with these, as I perused the 1600+ comments submitted so far, and it doesn’t seem like anybody thinks this is a good idea.
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