A deep-sea mining company that hopes to extract minerals from the Pacific Ocean and process them in the U.S. has launched an expedition to map and sample a large swath of the seafloor.
Glomar Minerals launched a ship from Tahiti last week to survey the mineral-rich Clarion-Clipperton Zone in the ocean for polymetallic nodules, marking the first survey of the highly coveted area in more than four decades.
Companies are racing to map the Pacific region between Hawaii and Mexico and secure permitting as the Trump administration moves to establish a deep-sea mining industry in domestic and international waters. While pilot tests have been conducted, full-scale commercial deep-sea mining has never occurred in U.S or international waters.
Glomar’s subsidiary holds two contracts held by the U.N.-affiliated International Seabed Authority, or ISA, to explore the Clarion-Clipperton region and is waiting on the international body to hammer out final rules before moving forward with any mining. The licenses previously belonged to aerospace and defense giant Lockheed Martin. State-backed Chinese entities hold the largest number of exploration contracts at ISA, which oversees mining in international waters and has been working for years to develop a permitting framework.
