The United States will auction exploration rights over more than 31 million acres of Pacific seabed near American Samoa on 19 November, under a proposed leasing notice the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management published on 16 July. The auction area is roughly 125,000 square kilometres, and it borders the Rose Atoll marine sanctuary.

The bureau will run the sale as an ascending oral auction. Bidders are after polymetallic nodules, the potato-sized lumps of nickel, copper, cobalt and manganese that sit loose on the abyssal plain and are counted by Washington as critical minerals.

Two further blocks of about 140,000 square kilometres each are proposed east and west of Saipan, in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. Tracts near Guam are also under consideration.

The people who live closest to all three areas do not get a vote on any of them. American Samoa, the Northern Marianas and Guam are unincorporated US territories. Their residents do not vote for the president, and the delegates they send to the US House cannot vote on the House floor. What the territories have instead is a comment period.

“There have been no consultations with the people of the Northern Mariana Islands," the commonwealth's governor, David Apatang, said. He said mining risked "disruption to food security for the people of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, who rely on the ocean resources for their survival".”

American Samoa's delegate to the US House, Aumua Amata, told AFP she opposed the sale. "I represent our people, and I am confident that a majority of American Samoans are opposed," she said.

Under the process the bureau has set, comments from the Governor of American Samoa must reach it by 15 September. The bureau must consider them, then publish a final leasing notice at least 30 days before the sale. Consider is the operative word. Nothing in the sequence gives the territory a power to stop it.

Impossible Metals, one of the companies pursuing seabed nodules, has said it would share one per cent of profits with island communities. Emily Wood, a former US diplomat, put that figure against what the industry proposes to remove and disturb. "That's nothing at all, compared to the potential damage they might cause," she said.

The legal footing matters for anyone watching from Australia. Most of the world regulates seabed mining in international waters through the International Seabed Authority, which was created under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. The United States has never ratified that convention. It is licensing this seabed under its own domestic law, on its own timetable, and the authority has no role in it.

The region is not united on the question. Palau launched an alliance in 2022 calling for a moratorium on mining in international waters, and Fiji, the Federated States of Micronesia, Samoa, Vanuatu, Tuvalu and the Marshall Islands have backed a moratorium or a precautionary pause. Nauru, the Cook Islands, Kiribati and Tonga have moved the other way, drawn by the revenue. American Samoa was one of the alliance's early signatories, and it is now the site of the first auction.

The science the pause is meant to wait for is starting to arrive. A 2025 study published in Nature revisited a 1979 test mining track in the Pacific and found that 44 years on, biological impacts persisted across many groups of organisms and the physical marks on the seafloor were still there, though some populations had begun to re-establish. The blocks going to auction have not been surveyed at anything like that resolution, which is part of what an exploration licence is for.

The bureau has not yet published the final leasing notice. Until it does, the 19 November date is proposed rather than fixed, and the only formal step left for the territories is a set of written comments due in five weeks.