SAY NO TO SEABED STRIP MINING
- Grey Gowder
- Jul 8
- 7 min read
Last November, Odyssey Marine submitted an unsolicited request to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to mine 1.76 million acres of coastal waters off the coast of Virginia. This area, larger than the size of Delaware, is located from 3 to 63 miles offshore the Eastern Shore of Virginia. The Mid-Atlantic's coastal and nearshore ecosystems are home to an abundance of species and are connected by sea and air migrations to distant parts of the Atlantic.
Carolina Ocean Alliance has actively tracked the progress of this application from its initial submission to the opening of a "Request for Information" by BOEM last week. Over the last nine months, a strong coalition of national, regional, and local partners came together to oppose this threat to ocean health, coastal community resilience, coastal economies, and our national security. The approximately 1.76 million-acre proposed leasing area (“RFI Area”) identified in the applicant’s unsolicited mineral release sale request does not exist in isolation. The consequences of such a high-impact activity in this dynamic and interconnected coastal marine ecosystem could cause extensive harm beyond the defined RFI Area.
We have four main areas of concern:
Risk of harm to local and migratory protected and endangered species,
Risk of harm to habitat for culturally, commercially, and recreationally important fish species,
Risk of exacerbating coastal erosion threats and community resilience due to reduced alongshore and nearshore transport of sediment, and
Risk of setting a precedent for future coastal seabed mining in the Atlantic without a scientific consensus on the potential impacts of seabed mining on local, regional, and global marine ecosystems, and neighboring communities.
WHAT IS HEAVY METAL SAND MINING?
The seabed mining proposed in this application is called heavy mineral sands mining. This industry uses large specialty ships called Trailing Sucker Hopper Dredgers (TSHDs) that use massive vacuums with grinding and chopping blades inside to ingest vast amounts of marine sediments into the ship above. This process has a high by-catch rate, fatally ensnaring sea turtles, fish, and other creatures that call the sea floor home.
The RFI Area is an important habitat for commercially and recreationally important fish species, overlapping in part with Essential Fish Habitats for 20 species managed by the Mid-Atlantic Fisheries Management Council and 25 highly migratory species. These species support vibrant regional commercial and recreational fisheries in the Eastern Shore of Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware, are closely linked with highly migratory fisheries from the Carolinas to New England, and are interlinked with the health of coastal marshes and waterways that support historic and culturally-significant maritime industries like mariculture and shellfish aquaculture, ecotourism, seafood processing and service, and other coastal trades.
Heavy mineral sand mining operations would put these marine ecosystems and the communities that rely on them at risk. Industrial-scale dredging operations to access and exploit mineral deposits on the continental shelf would have a far greater impact on the immediate sites and the surrounding ecosystem than a routine coastal beach renourishment dredging project. Hopper dredging on localized scales for beach renourishment is already considered a major source of mortality for sea turtles that get caught in the dredge draghead, impacts on prey species, and impacts to water quality.
Expanding the footprint of this dredging into the open ocean would destroy benthic habitats by removing immense amounts of sediment and benthic fauna, create noise and light pollution, and impact water quality and turbidity through sediment plumes. Sediment plumes from mining the seabed have historically had severe effects on phytoplankton and benthic primary producers due to reduced light availability in the sea, leading to a reduction in fish populations and further impacts on other large fauna. Depending on the proximity of the mining activity to the shore, the plumes could be carried towards coastal ecosystems, smothering or contaminating estuaries and shellfish beds, or could be carried northward into other sensitive marine areas.
WHAT SPECIES ARE AT RISK?
The coastal ocean of the Mid-Atlantic is a highly dynamic and biodiverse region home to a wide variety of ecosystems and species already threatened by changing ocean and coastal conditions, water quality degradation, coastal development, and sediment mining for beach renourishment. The addition of a high-impact activity like seabed mining could impact fish, their habitat, and other species in the same ecosystems by altering the hydrology, sediment landscape, and water quality of surrounding areas by causing sediment plumes or releasing metallic substances into the water column.
Protected Coastal Reserves
The RFI Area neighbors the Virginia Coast Reserve (VCR), a highly dynamic, heterogeneous coastal barrier landscape spanning 110 km of mainland watersheds, tidal marshes, lagoons, deep inlets, and barrier islands on the Delmarva Peninsula, the majority of which are conserved lands owned by The Nature Conservancy and federal and state agencies and protect some of Virginia’s most significant natural areas. The barrier islands are home to nearly 250 bird species, along with other charismatic species like sea turtles, dolphins, and horseshoe crabs. The VCR’s bays have been the site of extensive seagrass restoration efforts and are now the largest successful seagrass restoration in the world, spanning nearly 12,000 acres, providing habitat for juvenile fish and conditions for successful bay scallop restoration.
VCR has been internationally recognized as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve and serves as a living laboratory for the University of Virginia’s Coastal Research Center. Researchers at UVA LTER carefully study how slow, progressive environmental changes interact with short-term disturbances, such as storms and species invasions, to control the dynamics and biotic structure. This delicate and nationally significant work aims to deepen our understanding of the ecological services the coastal barrier systems provide and predict how changes in these landscapes will alter the ecosystems shaped by them.
Endangered Shore Birds.
The VCR supports significant nesting populations of shorebirds like the federally threatened Atlantic Coast Piping Plover, Wilson’s Plover, and American Oystercatcher, some of which nest exclusively within the area. As the longest-remaining expanse of coastal wilderness on the east coast, the VCR is the most significant breeding region in Virginia for nesting seabirds and wading birds like the Gull-billed Tern, Black Skimmer, Little Blue Heron, Tricolored Heron, Snowy Egret, Glossy Ibis, and Black-crowned Night Heron. The VCR also hosts an internationally significant migration stopover site for the federally threatened Red Knot, Hudsonian Whimbrel, Short-billed Dowitcher, and Marbled Godwit, along with wintering habitat for significant populations of Nelson’s Sharp-tailed Sparrow, Atlantic Brant, Dunlin, and American Oystercatchers.
Endangered Sea Turtles
Virginia’s waters host at least four species of endangered sea turtles. Loggerhead sea turtles regularly nest on Virginia’s southern mainland beaches, and surveys of beaches on Assateague and Wallops islands on the Eastern Shore (neighboring the RFI Area) have seen the species’ nesting activity double from the early 1970s to 2020. This remarkable success in species recovery would be threatened by disruption of habitats and food webs offshore Virginia within the RFI Area where juvenile and adult sea turtles forage seasonally.
Endangered Sturgeon
Atlantic Sturgeon, whose Chesapeake Bay DPS is listed as ESA-endangered, regularly travel between their spawning grounds in tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay and their adult habitats in the Atlantic Ocean.
Marine Mammals
The RFI Area also sits within an important migratory corridor for the critically endangered North Atlantic right whales that travel along the East Coast from Prince Edward Island to Georgia. This is also critical habitat for other large marine mammals that regularly use that area, including humpback and fin whales, bottlenose dolphins, sperm whales, and pilot whales. Seabed mining could disrupt access to food, increase harmful contaminants in the water and in the marine food chain, and increase marine noise pollution that could impact local and migratory marine mammal species.
THREATS TO COASTAL COMMUNITY RESILIENCE
Beyond the immediate leasing area, there are regional and basin-wide implications of exploitation, including to nearby nationally significant ecosystems and coastal communities that are already investing significant resources to protect themselves from accelerated erosion and sea-level rise.
From the Chincoteague, Eastern Shore of Virginia, Fisherman Island and Back Bay National Wildlife Refuges, the Assateague Island National Seashore and numerous state-protected areas and private conservation lands, many coastal areas near or adjacent to the proposed leasing sites have been durably protected because of their sensitive, threatened and endangered species, many of which rely on nearby healthy marine ecosystems. Ongoing living shoreline creation and restoration has effectively protected key habitats and historic communities from coastal flooding and storm surges. All of this is possible because the existing alongshore and nearshore transportation of sediments remains intact.
Coastal landscapes are constantly eroding and accreting in a delicate balance that maintains and slowly transforms these dynamic landmasses over thousands of years. When those natural sediment-nourishment systems are disrupted by seawalls, groins, jetties, or other fixed infrastructure, we have historically seen accelerated erosion of downstream areas. These fixed structures actively remove sediment from the system, thus exacerbating downstream impacts.
This leads to a wasteful and destructive cycle of seasonal coastal renourishment. We do not know the scale of the consequences of heavy mineral sediment mining as proposed, but it will surely outweigh any proposed offsets by the applicant through the use of by-product sediments. Inevitably, neighboring and downstream communities will need to invest substantially more money to offset the erosive effects of the disruption and depletion of their natural sediment nourishment streams.
RISK OF SETTING A PRECEDENT
We must be responsible stewards of our seabed and coastal ecosystems. Exposing critical ecosystems to seabed mining without a full understanding of the consequences for the broader ocean and neighboring communities represents a departure from this responsibility.
A thorough review of all available science must be conducted before consideration of leasing in this area or any similar coastal context to ensure that development of “vital national resource reserve held by the Federal Government for the public” is carried out “subject to environmental safeguards” as defined by the OCS Lands Act. These environmental safeguards must account for impacts both within and beyond the designated RFI Area.
Given what we already know about the potential for harm, and the significant gaps in scientific understanding of the scale, scope, and long-term impacts of heavy mineral sand and phosphate mining on coastal ecosystems and neighboring communities, we opposed the opening of coastal ecosystems to minerals leasing.
So, for all these reasons, including the clear risk of harming endangered bird, marine mammal, and fish species in violation of federal and state law, damage to local fishing and other ocean based industries in the region, and the risk of making worse, not better, coastal communities’ ability to respond with resilience to erosion and other damaging effects of storms and sea level rise, we oppose coastal seabed mining offshore of Virginia and in US territorial waters.
Join us in saying no to seabed mining
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