The waters straddling the route between Guam and Wake Island — a remote stretch of the western Pacific that most travellers only glimpse from a military charter — have become the latest flashpoint in America's push toward deep-sea mining.
NOAA has confirmed an application from Eco Minerals for an exploration licence covering part of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, an enormous underwater plain between Hawaii and Mexico that holds one of the world's largest fields of polymetallic nodules. These fist-sized rocks sit loose on the seafloor and contain nickel, cobalt and other metals used in batteries and renewable energy tech. A virtual public hearing is set for Nov. 16, with written comments accepted until Dec. 14 via regulations.gov under docket NOAA-NOS-2026-2608.
The numbers behind the story are staggering. Roughly 210 trillion tons of nodules are estimated to litter the global ocean floor, and the Clarion-Clipperton Zone alone may hold around 21.1 billion tons across roughly 1.7 million square miles. The US has never issued a commercial deep-sea mining licence, so this application — filed back in 2005 but only now made public — could be an early step in opening American-controlled Pacific waters to extraction.
It is not happening in isolation. Washington has scheduled the first US deep-sea mining lease sale for waters off American Samoa, offering about 31 million acres of seabed, and a separate proposed lease notice covers seabed off the Mariana Islands with an auction planned for December. Whether Eco Minerals' target area overlaps with the Mariana lease block remains unclear.
Environmental groups are pushing back hard, arguing the industry is moving faster than the rules governing it. The Clarion-Clipperton Zone falls under the International Seabed Authority, but the patch of ocean between Guam and Wake Island touches US-administered territory: Wake is an unorganised, unincorporated US territory about 1,501 miles from Guam, though the Marshall Islands also claims the coral atoll.
For anyone who knows the Pacific as a diving, sailing or island-hopping destination rather than a mineral deposit, this story matters. The same waters that draw visitors to Guam's reefs and the atolls of Micronesia could, within the decade, host mining vessels and sediment plumes. The public hearing — registration closes Nov. 12, capped at 1,000 attendees — is one of the few open doors for comment before exploration proceeds.
