 We'll get we'll get started here first. I'm going to hand it over to Jonathan for a couple of housekeeping items Yeah, thanks. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for coming back for day two We had a great day one of the meeting yesterday and hope you had a good evening last night and a good sleep Just a quick housekeeping note we Received a couple of comments online yesterday that Folks online would very much appreciate if when people in the room are speaking that they could identify themselves because the room camera is hard to pick up people and if the camera is focused on the The podium for example It's hard to hard to identify who's speaking if you're in the room you can also join the zoom So that and have your camera on so that at least an alternate my camera on Practice what you say so so that at least people can can See who's speaking in that sense If you do join the the zoom In the room, please disconnect from the room audio So that we don't get any sorry disconnect from the computer audio so that we don't get any feedback I Think that was all I wanted to say that sounds good So we're gonna jump right in I don't want to I want to kind of keep us on time and make sure that We've got plenty of time for the the sessions today. We had a great session yesterday and there are still Lots of discussion points. I do want to remind everyone although this committee doesn't provide a formal written response as a committee through Through the National Academy of Science, you're certainly welcome to email each other scientists between Bohm and and and members on the committee if you have ideas you have Thought someone presented something that you want to follow up on or there's more questions I'm gonna make sure that there's a good dialogue happening because that and that's completely Acceptable and encouraged and everything else. So just said as much as possible this committee is here to to help and and and advise and And and we also want to make sure that the questions are going both ways It's not just the committee asking questions, but please for for the Bohm scientist If you have questions that you you think someone on the committee might answer Don't hesitate or you know to ask so with that Jeff will hand it over to you to introduce the first first session. Thanks, Kevin. Yes, Jeff Right now or with Bohm. I'm one of the guilty parties who didn't identify themselves a few times yesterday, so I apologize for that I'll do a better job today. So our first Discussion is going to be on Bohm's role in coastal resilience. So this is a super exciting topic for us Current sediment requirements Will we will change as optimal resources are depleted New knowledge and technology advances are uncovered and coastal communities implement their resilience plans To meet these future challenges, the Marine Minerals program is taking proactive steps to fulfill its resource and environmental stewardship mission This stewardship begins with public partnerships and that's something we talked about a lot yesterday Listening to our stakeholders and providing a national perspective on the cumulative impact of current coastal resilience practices At every opportunity we're trying to raise awareness that offshore sediment is Critical to the future viability of current coastal resilience strategies As sediment availability is more constrained that there will be Environmental tradeoffs to consider and to that end the program has promoted a systems-based regional Sediment management approach and future Environmental research to meet these challenges and so to kick us off this morning Ashley and Jen who is going to be calling in remotely are going to be providing a overview of our role in community coastal resilience Ashley Thank you, Jeff. Sorry Ashley. Can you just pause for one second while we try and get a camera on you so that those online can see Really not necessary That's the back of your head No, I live in Anchorage, you know, we can go all the way to Paul. That's fine Thrilling viewing for those online Oh Right Are we all set please? Yes. All right, great Well, Jeff, thank you for that introduction As he's mentioned Jen and I are going to talk about marine minerals programs role in coastal resilience Next slide, please We'll go ahead and go to slide two, please Thank you So first let's talk about just defining resilience There's a lot of different definitions on this slide and they all have one commonality and that's related to recovering from a disturbance A coast be resilient if it's able to withstand sealable rise and it'll also be able to recover quickly from large storms It's anticipated that these storms may become more frequent larger and more intense in the future Either perturbation to this particular system this coastal zone requires both natural and anthropogenic solutions So we have our list. We've got, you know, various natural Structures. We've got things that are related to policy scenario planning I think I heard funding things like that things that we can do and actions that we can take So let's compare this list to a list that was assembled from actual coastal resilience plans From the nature of conservancy's coastal resilience website and from the u.s. army corps Engineering with nature's website. If we move to the next slide, we've developed a word cloud From those particular We'll call them authoritative And I can't speak this morning. I'll slow down sources All right, so I know somebody yelled out nature-based solutions, right? That's a big one, right? That's one of our buzzwords right now other Ideas or thoughts in here solutions revolve around What you can actually do physical changes you can relocate you can armor You can provide revetments groins jetties some of our hard structures as well So the one thing I'd like to draw your attention to with this list and some of the lists that we've generated here Is that the solutions range from green to gray infrastructure? Green infrastructure is going to require enhancing an environment, right? Typically that's going to require sediment I think we kind of all agree on that The gray side is also going to require sediment to make concrete for asphalt for roads That building is going to require a lot of sediment as well Next slide, please So in this context, I also want to note that we consider coastal Restoration let me slow down coastal restoration and beach nourishment as a nature-based solution So we've got a lot of coastline and we've got a lot to implement to make a coast resilient And this is going to require a lot of sediment So this is kind of where we kind of come in for the marine minerals program So we have this kind of natural connection between the marine minerals And sediment need it for coastal resilience So The sediment that's going to be needed are going to be of various qualities They're going to require various specifications caliber sediment And that is all needed to actually improve our coastline So next slide, please Would it surprise anyone in this room to know that sediment is the second most commonly used Natural resource in the world. This is second only to water I mean, that's that's a big statement, right? And we also know that water has its own challenges for their scarcity So this is something for us to consider in the long run If we think about the us and our use of sediment for beach nourishment We've had over a centuries worth of historical data of project-centric approaches Since 1923 The coast has put over 1.5 billion cubic yards of sediment on its beaches That's a ton of sediment You can see in this graph from echo et al 2021 That you can actually plot by decade that use And the r-squared value for our scientists is 0.9 8 It's a huge relationship there a very strong relationship If we continue with the current trends of how we're going That's going to be a ton of sediment over the next hundred years That's an exponential growth for the most part So this is something that kind of compels us to think about sediment maybe in a different way It's been recognized by the un and other folks that sand needs to be recognized as a strategic resource that delivers critical ecosystem services We need to map monitor and report sand resources For transparent science-based and data-driven decision making There's a really incredible quote within this un report on sand and sustainability That says the ongoing failure to safeguard sand As a strategic resource Is a significant multi-generational crisis that threatens the entire global response to climate change I think that's really powerful and that really illustrates the challenge that we're trying to prepare for as our coasts continue to change So how is marine minerals program responding to this challenge? Next slide please The marine minerals program Does not take direct action when it comes to coastal resilience rather For coastal resilience we support as our resource stewardship in environmental stewardship roles and mandates dictate As a steward for this research resource We have a national national perspective In terms of how those sediments are being used Where the activities are where the hot spots are across the nation This gives us a unique perspective and it also allows us to kind of see the writing of the wall We know that sediment is finite We know that we are going to have to potentially change the way we're doing things in order to Continue to meet all these different plans are being put into place Over the last hundred years all actions have been project-centric We may need a different approach over the next hundred So as stewards of the research resource We explore for those resources We facilitate use through our leasing. We also monitor our supply and demand We monitor the effects of the eco on the ecosystems and various potential impacts And we mitigate conflict so all to unlock those resources To effectively manage sediment resources and balance our environmental stewardship role Over the 95 000 plus miles of us coastline We need a regional sediment management framework that breaks up the coast into regional management districts that are denoted on physical boundaries rather than political ones This supports a science-based approach that facilitates better communication with all stakeholders To have a more equitable say in coastal resilience But first we really need to communicate what this could look like. We need a vision To be able to communicate that with our stakeholders The why we need to do it and what it could look like Next slide please To create this vision we brought together experts across disciplines governments NGOs and academia with the goal of defining What a collaborative science-based strategic system-based approach could look like for regional sediment management Now there is a regional sediment management plan that's adhered to by the army corps of engineers And you'll notice that that one is very restricted To onshore to the watershed easily scalable definitive boundaries And it's primarily focused on shore But in their mandate and the way that they define rsm, they include the littoral zone But often that's not incorporated in their rsm activities So And the army corps of engineers south atlantic district regional sediment management center for expertise. That's a mouthful We co-led this workshop We chose to have a graphics facilitator at the workshop to help ensure That we could capture this paradigm shift with graphics to make it Simple to visualize and to actually communicate to maximize the likelihood of stakeholder buy-in Next slide please We started the workshop focusing on these six major components to consider We have the temporal scale spatial scale geology geomorphology sediment transport and overall sediment management During that first workshop we wound up focusing on the latter four components We recognize that the temporal scale and spatial scale Were two that would require far more work than one workshop was going to actually be able to resolve And that this is something that we kind of had to put a pin in and revisit in the future So next i'm going to switch to a slide that shows some of the results of this particular workshop Go ahead next slide please So first what we did is visualize what a traditional sediment management could look like or does look like right now What we tried to capture in this particular graphic was that project-centric approach That an individual stretch of beach May be just kind of working in their 50 year plan developing what they're going to do In isolation without this broader consideration for the series of cascading effects that their actions would have on the sediment and on the environment So this graphic is really busy. I know We can provide it to you via PDF after the work after this particular talk But what I want to explain is that this graphic is supposed to represent the status quo for sediment management practices within one embayment That has kind of a boundary or a baffle along the coastal zone on the shelf That kind of restricts sediment movement across that In constructing the graphic we identified seven major categories that change the most between the current traditional state and the ideal state These components include the environmental considerations resource identification resource use use conflict data engineering and planning If you think about a project-centric approach resource identification is going to be made From those particular occulties in that area that they're primarily interested in economically something that's really close to shore They're going to be doing it in isolation They may you know be the have or have nots right those particular coastal communities that could afford To go out outside of the federal government and actually fund it themselves So you're going to have all these disparities across the coastline potentially You're also going to potentially have a lot of use conflicts If you don't know where the resources are it's hard to manage and you know that this is something that's been echoed throughout the days for this particular period And we want it to make this graphic built such a way that a presenter could walk the audience through any one of these seven different categories or components To give the ability to build a story right to explain What the sediment management practices are now and how they can change in the future So we're going to change slides in just a second But I oh we jumped um This is going to be like um, you know the spot the difference exercises that we did as kids Yeah, this is what this is going to feel like right? Um, so I'm going to say you know I definitely sat with my kids and those highlights books kind of circling the differences That's just what this is built to do. So we're going to switch to the next slide We're going to move from a project-centric approach to more of a regional approach to sediment management You'll notice that in this ideal state we have less conflict We have more cooperation between beaches shown by like the boats kind of going through and being Bringing sediment across multiple beaches We also have more equity equity in terms of like the beach width, right? We have similar widths across we don't have this kind of jagged nature to the coast We also have have less constrained movement of sediment You may or may not have noticed but some of these dams were removed Some of the jetties and groins were taken out to allow for the sediment to move a little bit more naturally and to spread efficiently There's all different ways for us to get here But this is just supposed to does to start the conversation about Why it's important to make this change and to offer a couple solutions for how to get there But really this is talking about getting a lot of stakeholders together In one particular location To talk about the challenges identify the opportunities and actually implement the plans So we would like to see a move from project-centric approaches to regional management With these new strategies boom can now appropriately align our science with regional need Next slide, please So marine minerals program has several different research themes in terms of our resources Now these themes all kind of work together with one another So we have a supply and demand Theme and this will kind of tell us Where we need to direct spending highlight need areas to focus on The cornerstone of this research is obviously in resource evaluation, right? These can be broken up into geologic framework studies that explain why the resources are found where they are and resource evaluation studies in terms of sediment budget Because we're looking at the shallow stratigraphy in the subsurface We have a direct link between what's going on on the surface and those particular deposits beneath So as we remove sediment We also need to kind of monitor how they recover Now as we continue to define and identify new resources that directly impacts our supply Right, so we're we're seeing this interplay between the two We also do a lot of research in terms of risk mitigation So our environmental risk could fall into this Our multi-use planning risk can also fall into this particular category And these inform how to manage the resource in the least impactful way So if we apply mitigations, we may unlock more resources Or we may determine that we can't really mitigate this particular conflict And we say we just can't do it here and those reserves get pulled off the table for use Now the last piece that we have is borrow area optimization This is kind of more of our technological research that we do as we become more efficient As we find ways to make what was technically unrecoverable resources now recoverable That influences our The amount of resource that we have There's then in flex supply and demand So this is a great interplay in terms of resource management research themes that we have Now these themes directly map to the seven different Regional sediment management themes that we're identifying in our workshop next slide, please And we can actually put those different management themes on our puzzle pieces next slide please Such that the planning identified in the To change the most between our traditional and ideal state Maps right to supply and demand Our resource identification is very easy to kind of map right to resource evaluation As I mentioned risk mitigation encompasses our environmental and use conflicts Borrow area optimization is really a lot of engineering but resource use and data Those map to potentially all of them they inform and then they change based off of what we do here So all of those seven different categories that we talked about as being most critical and to change the way we do things Map directly to the way MMP directs their their spending Next slide, please So you may remember that I kind of identified scale As a big unknown in terms of what we were doing for regional sediment management and how we get there I'd like to zoom in to the southeast Atlantic where we have a series of coastal compartments that were defined by Hayes and Fitzgerald in 2013 They took the southeast coast and used wave height and tidal range So kind of our physical forcings from on the coastline And plotted those relative to the resultant And geomorphology in terms of our barrier island length number of inlets in a particular location and actually start subdividing the coast So these are Romanomals one through six These are pretty large stretches along the coast, but they have definable characteristics in terms of geologic and oceanographic processes Now these coastal compartments are akin to maybe the watershed or drainage basin analysis that regional sediment management projects are typically based on on shore If we take this and we think about the underlying geology in a very similar area So these are denoted with a through d and their representative cross sections the right hand side That's from the near shore area using chirp seismic We can see that there's actually a big difference in terms of the geology as well And the sediment availability from A to D So in the north in northern South Carolina We have the Cretaceous cropping out near the seafloor And very little quaternary sediment being preserved. It's very patchwork We're sitting up atop the Carolina platform very close to the Cape Fair arch in this particular location So we have an explanation for why sediments are very restricted in this particular area As we move to the south as we go towards southern central georgia, we get into the georgia embayment We have increased accommodation. We actually have quaternary sediments that are being preserved Almost as complete sequences or parasyquices and here you can kind of see that we would potentially have a very different strategy for looking for sand Data collection strategy as well where maybe we can use our seismic a little bit more In the south because we have these continuous units that we can start being predictive of use our secret stratigraphic principles Whereas in the north with this patchwork series of incisions and and surface sands It's a lot more difficult. So maybe we got to be a little bit more data heavy in the north So this denotes kind of different challenges in different coastal compartments from A to D Another really awesome thing that we have using coastal compartments is the ability to actually transfer learnings So haze and Fitzgerald denoted that coastal compartment two Actually has a lot of similarities to coastal compartment six And in terms of what we do We actually see a fair amount of leasing in both of those compartments as well So it's something else to kind of consider as we're moving on Now on top of this is also just sediment delivery to the system to the near shore and we actually have Discharge denoted by different Piedmont coastal plain rivers On land here to kind of tie in that sediment budget piece Discharge is standing in for sediment delivery to the coastline And that is also another piece for us to consider when we're denoting what are different coastal compartments should be Next slide, please So the Army Corps of Engineers published their version of regional and local scales from the perspective of physical processes in space and time And this is shown in the graph on the right However, there is no nationwide characterization along the coast We need to marry the onshore approach this watershipped scale to the offshore Overlaid on this discussion of the appropriate appropriateness of scale determined by physical processes Is the question of societal considerations Divisions of the coast exist from political boundaries our states counties localities Our army core districts and divisions or our cultural boundaries in terms of indigenous current or ancestral lands So how can we break up the coast to ensure an effective representation in addition to tying in the physical processes Now adaptation of this regional management approach requires buy-in from all stakeholders on all levels One of the greatest impediments we see to this endeavor is overcoming the sand ploddy perception problem When people go to the beach They see sand When repairs are necessary Sand can be found A common misconception is that sand can be found in abundance on the seafloor Stretching out as a continuation of the beach for miles, right? This goes hand in hand with the challenges facing coastal resilience adaptation When a threat to a coast is incremental With like sea level rise and stretched out beyond normal human observation scales It is hard to communicate The need for transformative rather than incremental change is identified from the national climate assessment Especially as human consumption of sediment far outpaces natural time scales of creation Next slide, please So this is kind of kind of sum up this conceptual discussion about regional sediment management and bone's role in coastal resilience I want to highlight that what we're proposing here for regional sediment management Is very similar and complements really well to ecosystem space management that was discussed before They both inherently need a thorough understanding of physical processes There's also a linkage between site characterization And regional evaluations So there's a lot of work that can be done to really marry these two The next steps that we have planned for this particular effort for rsm visioning is a phase two Right now we're planning to visualize each of the seven different regional sediment management themes that change the most Define roles and responsibilities for key stakeholders within a particular coastal compartment And define strategies and tactics to move forward So in the next set of slides, we're going to talk about current and future research in terms of mmp Investments, but while we're doing that, I'd like you guys to consider recommendations for how to facilitate stakeholder buy-in for this particular endeavor And also get information from you in terms of how to determine the best scales For the most effective management both spatially and temporally in the future Next slide, please Next slide So first I want to talk about Our bar area and resource classification scheme that we're proposing We have a contract right now to actually do this One element that restricts resource management is a lack of borough area or resource classification schemes In the image on the right, we have a map developed by pelton at l in 2017 In this map, we have the delmarva We have a series of shore oblique sand ridges To note it by the highs they all kind of Are trending northeast southwest for the most part They've also been defined into various different ridge fields And those are denoted by the different circles that you have Next slide, please Overlaid on these particular ridge fields, which were defined by shape orientation migration patterns, which were determined from the illustration on the right We can put the borrow areas actual least borrow areas that were used for different beach nourishment projects across this region You'll notice that we've got three different borrow areas and they're in three different ridge fields So now we have questions Were all these borrow areas equally successful? Were they all treated similarly when it came to environmental impact analyses? Were risk identified pre-construction actually realized in these borrow areas? And what learnings or expectations can we transfer from one area to the next? Sounds kind of similar to the ecosystem's base management, right? So we need a classification schema or tool to address these questions If we have a common language A unified vocabulary of offshore resources we can communicate results effectively As we document used borrow areas where we have a wealth of data and performance indicators We can ensure that learnings are actually passed from one location and event to the next And that these learnings are not actually lost We can also build a framework that extends the parameters from our knowns Our borrow areas where we have the most information to our unknowns or potential sand resources In that particular ridge field or beyond We can also develop an analog database from this information Say we have shore bleak sand ridges in another location But that's saying that this is going to be a resource type, but just kind of go with me here We can then take our range of expectations and apply those reducing uncertainty as we continue to work If this endeavor appears successful We will exercise an option to further define risk factors for each borrow area type or sand resource type Risk could be internal to the particular resource in terms of shell content Mac color or external in terms of EFH proximity to hard bottom, etc This approach facilitates regional trade-off analysis between several different resources So in all this particular project will address resource identification use conflict and environmental rsm themes That were identified in our visioning exercise and will also help move MMP towards reserves management Next slide, please The last case Study or investment that I would like to talk about is from the mid-atlantic And this is one that kind of keeps coming up, right? We've got a lot of activity in the mid-atlantic in terms of our wind And we've got a lot of potential conflict with MMP sand resources as well So MMP has had multiple stakeholders requesting support for sand resource identification In light of the current need projected need and spatial planning challenges We have set up a contract to collect geophysical and geological data of our pretty wide area The study area goes from Foscape, Virginia north to Montauk Point, New York The offshore extent we incorporate it from The federal state boundary all the way out to 24 nautical miles This includes several of the actual lease areas for wind as shown by the polygons on the map Now we did this because there's a lot of information that we're going to be able to extract from these different regions There is a wealth of data in the mid-atlantic if you look at mmis there is a ton of data But not all data is created equally right in terms of what you could use it for How can we take this really broad area with really great coverage in terms of data and actually determine focus areas that will give us the maximum value For our limited line miles and cores that we have to such a broad area Next slide, please So we are going to overlay two different geospatial approaches And marry that with stakeholder input The first approach is to look at data So we have a wealth of data We have this product here that was developed a few years ago That looks at data density and actually just breaks up our geophysical lines by OCS block and gives us relative abundance And then overlight on that is an abundance of geological data. So cores and grabs This is a way for us to kind of visualize with simplicity again another theme Where we actually have a high concentration it should have the best understanding in terms of sand resources in an area These are using the same type of data that we use in order to define resources but Of course Some of these data are really old. Some of these data we can't find anymore Some of these data can't adjust geological framework rather than help us to actually define the sand resource So now we need to go through and assess quality And this particular contract they're going to go through and actually To find out quality similar to if you're going to create a geomodel or a Geological model into a reservoir model where you kind of get your uncertainties bound and you understand the limits of your data How far you can kind of push things We're going to develop that first pass map on data quality We are going to overlay that with an avoidance map Now the gulf of mexico had a contract a few years back with stradley and they produced this really awesome avoidance map that incorporates Cables and pipelines to kind of help identify high conflict areas Areas that you can kind of focus on to the de-conflict But this will help us high grade Areas that have a data need data gap a knowledge gap with accessible resources if they exist Which is also a big if These two products overlay don't want another I think will be very powerful for us And we will then integrate these products with what our stakeholders are saying in terms of the needs what they're seeing for what they need for their various projects over the next 50 hundred years So the new data collected in this to or this task order Will combine resource identification from this rsn themes use conflict and our data themes So next jam will take over and focus on the current and future Investments that address the environmental theme for rsn with respect to coastal resilience Next slide, please Great. Thanks, ashley. Can everybody hear me? Okay, ashley. Can you give me a thumbs up? You walked away I can only see ashlyn right now. Sorry thirsty You can hear me. Okay, thanks Sorry about that. Put you on the spot there. All right Let me change my view real quick. So, okay So thanks everybody. Sorry. I cannot be there in person today to talk to you about this but We're gonna continue a little bit on some of the themes yesterday that dina and anna touched on about our environmental studies We wanted to give you some examples where they tie in directly to some of the regional sediment management that ashley explained Dina and anna talked on I talked a lot about habitat value. They talked about developing mitigation Multi-use conflicts. All of that is relevant in our first example that we're going to talk about here and as they mentioned our studies are meant to tie this regional sediment management with ecosystem based management together by focusing on not only resource need but also The biological the ecological or other resource areas that are protect potentially affected by our Offshore sand use and these include things like essential fish habitat, which we'll talk about And other resources that we focus on so that we can design more effective mitigation measures to avoid minimize or eliminate adverse environmental impacts Next slide, please So here's a very project specific like a regional Less than a regional scale a more On the spatial scale. It's much more focused environmental study that were That was initiated in the fall of 2022 runs through the fall of 2026 and it's focused on frying pan shoals frying pan shoals falls within that coastal compartment too that ashley spoke about which is a very sand limited area And this is an example of a ecosystem based management study that we developed And it's off of southeastern north carolina This is a cooperative agreement with unc. Wilmington And we are attempting to characterize this important sand resource We know that it's designated as an essential fish habitat and there are a lot of concerns both federally and the state locally the federal state and local level From officials about impacting this sand shoal In this project, we're seeking to understand the environmental and then biological systems along this cape associated shoal That we are believe will be a target for future renourishment projects To address these questions we have we're focusing on data gaps for habitat and spatial distribution of key species benefit communities sediment transport pathways and rates The Cape Fear River, which you can see is adjacent directly adjacent to the shoal Plays up a major influence on the shoal itself So we want to get a better understanding of what that influence is both physically and biologically And then we ultimately want to provide actionable data and modeling so that we can examine impacts Potential impacts for the shoal When or if we get a request to utilize the shoal to mitigate risks and to enable long-term planning Um, I also want to mention that this shoal is directly adjacent to the long bay the carolina long bay wind energy area So a lot of the research from this shoal From this study will also be relevant to the use of that area and the placement the potential placement of any transmission corridors I should mention as well that There is a similar study in the Gulf of Mexico that um Is at ship shoal It's another kind of ecosystem based study that i'm sure our Gulf of Mexico partners would be happy to speak to as well You know later at a later time if you'd be interested in that Next slide please right so tying back to um coastal resilience and climate change We wanted to bring up a project so the exist the prior slide is a project that's ongoing. This is a project that um is a study profile on the next studies studies development plan And it's a existing Project emissions calculator. So we're tying this into our consideration of climate change when we do our analysis of these projects As you know as um victoria pointed out the umbrella of nipa of nipa that we evaluate potential impacts under this mandate and That includes greenhouse gas and climate change effects Um with there's recent cq guidance that requires the disclosure of these greenhouse gas emissions and climate change This existing this calculator was already in existence. Um, jeff weichel developed it I want to say 10 years ago. Maybe not quite that long and we have been utilizing it In our nipa analyses and it's also utilized by the army corps of engineers. So as we're we typically cooperate agency with them as they're the lead agency We do this analysis and provide it with them to them with some text for our nipa documents and the calculator itself has an output it considers um operational factors activity profiles loading factors and emission factors for all different equipment types you essentially you pick the dredge type You insert the cubic yards that you're planning to dredge Or that was requested in a lease request and then you also enter some other things such as Distance from shore for the borough area and you get as you can see on the bottom right and output of emissions For various Greenhouse gases and other emissions that we have for different operational like equipment. So whether it's a crew boat or a dredge itself or a onshore Excavator you get an emissions output for that Um, and this is great. It's just that it's a little bit outdated A lot of the loading factors and emission factors need to be updated We also have Considered adding well methane would definitely be an addition. There are some gases that other additional gases that we've considered adding Um to the calculator as well And again, we're still working on putting this adding this to the next year's studies development plan Um, so while we're, you know, increasingly interested in how our program can respond to sea level rise and increased storm changes This is kind of the other side. We're also Also need to understand how our activities could potentially add To that climate change as well Next slide We also wanted to propose to you some future research considerations that dina and I have been discussing For a future year study development plans um As bill mentioned a top priority for bone is to protect ecosystems in the context of climate change And as it relation as it relates to dredging We have some additional questions regarding the intersection between dredging impacts and climate change Um that we may that we presently don't have a lot of answers to So these are kind of on two different temporal scales. I would say the first and the second bullet The first one is looking at potential habitat shifts that we know such as, uh, maybe fish or sharp fixture sharp habitat shifts that we know may be occurring Uh within a range of habitats Due to climate change and then Looking at how we are analyzing Our impacts our potential impacts to habitat And not maybe not considering in light of that the habitat shifts Um, what how how much greater impacts they may be so for example say Offshore we're considering, you know impacts to a bar. We're saying we're considering impacts to a borrow area offshore But not giving the consideration of the fact that some of that habitat Some of those species that are utilized in that habitat may actually be moving more onshore and while we may have Ample offshore habitat the onshore habitat may or closer to shore not onshore but closer to shore The near shore habitat may have already been impacted by previous dredging and we haven't really considered that as sea level rises that Habitats will be moving around and how is that impacted by our activities? The second concept is concept is more of a cumulative impacts consideration. So how uh, what's the intersection of dredging impacts Changes to habitat from climate change and cumulative impacts from also other activities that may be impacting similar habitat Such as something for fisheries or sea turtles Next slide please So this is a summary of what we've been talking to you about over the last hour 50 minutes or so These are long-term considerations for our program. We As mentioned in multiple presentations aimed to proactively position ourselves to support coastal resistance resilience We ideally will then also maintain a balance of resource and environmental stewardship and an increasingly crowded ocean I know that's been echoed multiple times as well Our key sea research themes to be addressed are continuing to support O'Conneson's level data collection efforts and prioritize areas where we have demand which out is outpacing current supply We're promote research and trade-off analyses that consider the range of ocean uses again. So When it comes to for example, something like frying pan shells There's a trade-off there between essential fish habitat and need for coastal resilience and which Doing a trade-off analysis on on on those Those different trade-offs and considering which one may have more need or value We as we've echoed many times Our partnering with state and federal agencies We're working to unravel the state the sediment transport processes from onshore to offshore And undertaking a coastal state supply and demand study And we're also as I've just mentioned looking at future environmental studies that focus on climate change and our intersection with dredging and the last slide please for our presentation is um A summary of the questions that actually had previously posed for your input And also the questions that I posed regarding climate change and dredging And we'd love to have your input or have any questions that Ashley and I could answer for you Great. Thank you very much. Thank you. Ashley and and jennifer. I that's a lot of uh information very very thought-provoking so, um Would would anyone in the committee like to start to take a take a crack at some of these questions? sure Hi everybody. Um, one thing I noticed is that there isn't a data layer for biodiversity or biological richness Um, to some extent that overlaps with the central fish habitat, but not completely. They're often orthogonal Um, is that just not practical? Or why don't why don't we see it there? That is any to me I don't know much about the data layers and why their presence are absent. So I don't know if I'd be very helpful with that one Um, jenn, this is dina. I'll I'll try. Thanks dina. I appreciate it Hansen with foam. Um, I think a lot of times we look to external kind of data photos that might have Already, um, kind of compiled instead of recreating kind of own it would be beneficial I think to adapt it with, you know, these layers, you know, data layers that foam is generating But I know, you know for a lot of our analyses We will kind of go to like the northeast ocean data portal or Kind of places where this information already exists But regionally that varies right like the Data richness in this us southeast versus the mid-atlantic in northeast. Um, you kind of just have to Work with what's available So hopefully that helps. Thanks I have a comment on the the kind of the last the three points um Because you're you're you're looking at you're looking at climate change uh You know effects of climate change that could be impacted by dredging Um, are there cumulative effects? And how to determine the scale but that scale must be changed right with with the frequency of increased storms and And the power of these storms you it must be a it must be a moving bar, right? No pun intended there, but yeah Yeah, so hard to get your mind around I would think Yeah And there are times where we just have you know years with so many storms that we have Frequent dredge events and sometimes years where we just don't have that many dredge events So I guess that may be speaks to your moving bar, but um We expect that the dredge events overall on average would probably likely likely to increase in the future, of course as you saw from that exponential um graph from elko 2021 that actually blended or presented And I'd I'd also add that We consider potentially just bracketing the ranges of scales that we should be looking at for regional versus site specific So that we can actually start delineating. Okay, this is going to be the regional scale Maybe sometimes it overlaps with a site scale if there's a particular site. That's particularly big and massive but You know, how do you break up what you're looking at temporarily and spatially to be effective? To not completely overlap, you know You may need complete overlap spatially so that you actually participate in two different coastal compartments To actually fully realize the impacts the far field effects of what's going on in terms of resource as well So it is a really interesting question and we're just trying to figure out ways to get there ways to determine how to bracket those scales Yeah, and I think that definitely ties back to some of the discussion with on on dna yesterday because from a nipa perspective, we're really looking at the scale of Either, you know, a one-time event, which isn't the most favorable but a multiple of time event in a Borrow area, right? So we're looking at the environmental impacts within a borrow area and that's a very small scale if you look at frying panchols Even frying panchols is a very small regional area, but a borrow area would be just a subset of that and so What you're doing is like There are two different scales the the scale for the sediment management is even broader than an environmental scale, so I think that was part of the question. It was like You know, we've been focusing essentially on environmental questions are on very focused kind of smaller borrow areas scales where Maybe we need to broaden that and consider larger areas and how do you do that and at what time? Temporal scale do we do that on because we typically consider environmental impacts on the scale Driven by the army corps, which is about 50 50 years But if you're thinking about climate change, you're probably going to need to think maybe broader than that just to make sure that you encompass like an understanding of Habitat shifts and and what we're going to see on a longer scale. So it's There's a lot of temporal and spatial questions And we do things a little bit differently sometimes underneath but then we would do under a regional set of management Which makes it even more confusing Um art and skype is hand up. I don't anybody Hey, yes, I just wanted to uh Mention the question about biodiversity the study that Jen and mentioned earlier in the uh chip show area. We are looking at biodiversity numbers species even as shannons and so forth In fact, Dina showed some results from that study yesterday Where the You know the reference areas and the dredged areas are showing some differences and we're monitoring that So I just wanted to let you know that a lot of our studies do conduct biodiversity evaluations So I just want to mention that Right, thank you Did I just finish up one thing before I go ahead and then jack and and and lauren um one of the So so I do I work a lot with you know community structure and community shift and and in that I I was always kind of Struck with and it was dates back to Robert Payne and some of these these guys that were talking about um You know about regime shifts, and I think there's also actually a little chaos theory in there but if you have a pendulum in a in a in a grandfather clock and you You hit that clock once the pendulum will will change its it swing and then go back to the way it was but if you hit it multiple times It'll it'll actually change and you'll get a different you'll get a different swing and I wonder if that's A little bit of what you're trying to grapple with with a spatial and temporal scales. When does it when does Because of the the frequency of these storms and the amount of change. When does it when does it become a new paradigm and and and then you have to instead of trying to Rebuild or maintain what you have you have to look at a creation of something something new. So that's it was just a I thought I had with it jack I'm interested a little bit how you interact with other groups working on this So I'm familiar with the nsf coastal Ocean and people or coasts and people initiative lots of intensive mapping of Sediments say in the pacific northwest, but I'm sure there's others around the nation So that's an nsf effort And then we just saw the NOAA IRA call for lots of coastal resilience work Those groups So I would say a lot of what we're doing is kind of boots on the ground right We are interacting with local coastal communities. They're kind of helping us point to what their activities are We have been interacting with the committee for marine transportation systems That has a big interagency group associated with it as well And we've kind of talked to them about, you know, they're they're assembling a bunch of coastal resilience plans to help us Kind of start generating that list as well to start thinking about, you know, where those needs are You know, we have lots of partnerships across the federal and state governments So it's really just us all reaching out. We don't have anything formalized, but that's potentially where we need to go Is that bomb's role or is that something where we need to kind of raise the idea and see who may kind of step into this space Is a big question, right? Because it's not necessarily we're we're here saying, hey, there's potentially a sediment problem But this is a larger problem for the coastal communities, you know, and we're just a participant But generally generally in the Atlantic Through the reaching out that Ashley mentioned, we have an understanding of what other Agencies are working on to some extent. Sometimes we don't but I would say there are certain areas where we have a lot of detail coordination and certainly if Renewable energy is coordinating with Noah on mapping they will pull us in as well. So that's been a real help I think particularly in areas like the long Carolina long bay where we know Noah's doing Some surveys we found out about we're doing surveys the developers are doing surveys and we've all gotten together So look at survey plans and discuss Who's doing what and how they might intersect with one another See brian's hand. I don't know if there's a lot of people in the room Yeah, hey, this brian came from bowman the marine minerals program of the gulf We also do a lot of work with the gulf mexico alliance That for those of you who are not aware it's a group similar to marco up on the atlantic They do a lot of works collaboration of federal state agencies as well as local communities academia and everybody else um in the public and you know It's a great effort to be able to combine all of that information and data knowledge As a matter of fact ruth who's sitting in the room right now I was just sitting with her two months ago at the gulf mexico conference talking about some of this exact stuff so We are doing a lot of it in the gulf as well do a lot of work with the core of engineers to try to See if we can do to work together with them and help support their efforts as well Hey, this is lori summa. Thanks very much for the presentation. I think this is a It's all really important work um And you all may have said this over the last day or two and I missed it but are we good at quantifying the rate of Of resource depletion Do we know You know from one place to another Exactly what what the changes in rates of depletion are Which might help engage stakeholders if there's really near-term depletion. Yeah That's a great question and We know what we know and we know that there's a lot of unknowns So we do not have a good grasp on the actual Baseline how much sediment is available? So we can't give this overall broad number And then you start slicing and dicing that in terms of What's suitable for beach nourishment? What's suitable for back barrier nourishment? What's suitable for aggregates? We aren't there yet. You know, we're at the very beginning in terms of resource delineation and definition So I think we know what we have and we know how fast we're using that But we're constantly adding to that inventory and removing It's just such a moving target In defining your your this is kevin. Sorry and defining your scales um, how is how is technology? Playing and with that in far what I mean by that I mean you you gave a presentation of the technology that's it's developed now, but usually your your spatial and temporal scales shift as as technology improves And so are you seeing any improvements coming down the pike that are are going to kind of help you plan today? I'm going to say I don't know. Um, you know open that up to others in the room Dina, um, I I'd say from the ecological perspective We are are trying to capitalize on new technology to So sort of on that larger broader scale using models Things like that mapping that kind of thing and then on smaller scales Trying to use the kind of find scale tagging Very focused sampling methods So I think for the kind of biological side of it We are you know trying to use as much technology as we can as we develop our studies In this morning, we were talking about sort of Applying the tried and true methods while also adding this new technology so that you have a way to Almost gut check that your new technology is matching what you're finding with your kind of Standard methods. Um, so that's more on the ecology front But one thing that I thought about when you were talking about maybe the committee has thoughts on that rsm scale How does that match or mismatch the ecological scale? I know yesterday we talked about physical and biological kind of coupling And so we know that the physical environment can help determine the biological environment But there are certainly mismatches based on like history and what kind of organisms might also be there So I don't know if like, you know for that scale question We almost have to think of it in two different ways. What's what's physically meaningful. What's ecologically meaningful and how do those Um sync up So I don't know if the committee has kind of thoughts on the that kind of duality of scale as as well I I think From my knowledge of it, you guys are doing the best possible job of Jacknife and what do you know from one place to others? but I I still wonder How exposed we are in terms of things like Endangered species like piping plover or least term which are in the area And have a very indirect but possibly very important attachment to what's going on We we definitely this is dina hanson again and and jen's online She can certainly weigh in as well as our other environmental folks when we do consultation With no fisheries for endangered species Including those onshore animals that may not be directly in bohams jurisdiction. They are included in that Assessment as far as you know, we we estimate our impacts and then NOAA responds with whether they agree disagree And then they provide those mitigation measures, um, which sometimes they use bohams science to Develop and and so we're always kind of open to those partnerships to you know, say we have new There's a new data gap, you know, loggerhead sea turtles are being found farther north So there's a whole new you know kind of frontier there that we can explore So we that's sort of where we kind of get those study ideas Back and forth with our resource management agencies including onshore And james So switching a little bit to the the atmospheric side of things the You talked about looking at this looking at the emissions in terms of climate change I would say maybe also consider air quality as far as whether you're non-attainment or near non-attainment areas as the the federal standards get tighter and tighter They're going to be more and more important and for a lot of That are non-attainment or near non-attainment the scenarios the the conditions that lead to some of the the more intense air pollution days tend to Have these land sea breeze recirculation events. It's not just on like the Gulf Coast, but it's also even in Chicago with the Great Lakes similar situation where Things are are cooking over the water and coming in so if you're having these emissions out over the water They may have a climate change. I think of as a longer term, but there's also a more acute kind of short-term impact on coastal communities So I'd say maybe consider some of that as well with this and and with the emissions estimates that you have I do think that they probably need to be Updated I was happy to hear that that's part of the plan I was curious if that's going to be mostly based on on modeling or if there's going to be some empirical studies, I know Texas is beginning to look at commercial marine emissions as A needed area as for for improving that significantly I can address that. Um, sorry got muted. Um We do actually I didn't put it in here, but we do use the calculator for our air quality analyses And Historically for the Atlantic I won't speak for the Gulf but historically in the Atlantic Our projects have been adjacent to attainment areas Um, we have had maybe one or two and Jeff can correct me if I'm wrong. Jeff Michael Adjacent to not attainment areas. It might be one in New Jersey When we have projects in New Jersey, it becomes more relevant for concern Um, but yes, we do consider that and that is something that we do in our NEPA analyses For our air quality determination I feel like there was a second part of your question that I was going to address but I can't remember what it was at this point Look The the methodology for updating the emission This is Jeff Michael from boom. I'll jump in on that so limits the dredge fleet to basically I don't know. There's about 12 dredge plants that operate on the OCS effectively And so we can go in very specifically and get information about the tiering of of the engines and the propulsion systems and sort of we go into a process then that's peer review with EPA and Get the best information about emission factors associated with that that engine technology and its generation and and then on top of that We get some operational data from from the dredge plants themselves of how they're consuming fuel Of fuel types and get some information about the loading factors that allow us to get a reasonably good estimate of Of what the criteria pollutants will be and in areas like non attainment Then we work closely with EPA and go through their general conformity process to figure out what offsets may be necessary if you're in an entertainment zone and you're in excess of the permissible thresholds And we do have done some air mod modeling looking at shoreline fumigation And a couple and a couple project areas where there are noticeable coastal breezes that tend to have a onshore Offshore to onshore flux John hi John Jensen shifting the questions a little bit to The issue of stakeholder buy-in and forgive me. I'm new with this committee Who does bone consider to be stakeholders in this particular Complex of issues Yeah, great question So we're going to say we have lots of stakeholders and of all different levels You know, we primarily partner with the army core engineer in a lot of these projects But there's a lot of actors that are in this realm, right? We have various state agencies that we're working with Other federal agencies like NOAA for the environmental side of things But then we also have you know, kind of the the local township kind of scale Stakeholders the politicians there We have consultant firms that are working that actually help design projects and are participating And I would also say that you know, we are engaging more with our indigenous Communities as well and that they are another community that we need to bring as a key stakeholder Now defining how far inland we need to go Is a great question in terms of our stakeholders You know, we know that sentiment availability and transport offshore Starts all the way up in the top part of the drainage basin and works its way down So how far do we need to go into the drainage basin itself as another question? That we have and I would open it to the bone folks if I missed any broad categories It reminds me of a public meeting I went to like 2016 definitely The local population as well, right the citizens living along the coast There was a florida sand study that was published and the core of engineers Conveniently demarked how much sediment was offshore of each county Which really gives the impression that it belongs to the county even though it's on the OCS So when one county wanted to use sand from the adjacent county There was a lot of public outcry So those sorts of issues also things like Environmental groups, right the surf riders the surfing community that that's a definite vocal minority Or majority depending on where you're at Turtle groups things like that Yeah, excuse me that Jeff right now also I'd add especially up in the northeast like Virginia New Jersey The fishing community is an important stakeholder too One of the things again listening to the conversations yesterday today the question of stakeholders You know broader public I'm confused a bit about the economic value of sand I think a lot of aren't even used to thinking about sand as a critical resource which it Clearly is and so a calm, you know, some some stronger common language about You know about the tangible value Uh, what's the history, you know, how much has the how much of these communities? Depended on These resources over time The idea that although we don't know the dimensions of sand. We know it's finite, but you know How do we spend our sand wisely? And and again, it's a it's a it's a public communication thing But I figure if I'm confused about it, then some other people are as well And that just seems to be a big gap here is is really, you know, I've heard Yesterday there was a 21 Dollars per cubic meter or something and then other periods. It's not a value It's not a commodity resource and all that but perhaps it should be but anyway, that's That's a story and where I see the problem one of the problems here is just how are we How are we conceptualizing it a way That works across scales That people can understand And I don't think that that that necessarily that hard to do but that's What I'm interested in seeing more about Absolutely, I think you highlight something that we have lots of conversations about within our program And actually during the workshop we had One of the members bring up a slogan saying sand is land And you know, it's simple, but it's powerful. I mean it's something you can kind of equate to right and that is Maybe starting to get to the qualitative way to explain the value But I think there's definitely an opportunity there to further explore how we talk about the value of this particular resource Jeff right now from bone, I'll just add that In some circles we're known as the free sand program because we can't charge Literally can't charge for the sand that's used for beach nourishment But uh, paul brought up an interesting aspect of this Discussion yesterday in terms of you know, there are Areas, especially off the like the mid-atlantic that has that have heavy minerals mineral components to it So they may have value commercial value from that aspect too And does it make sense to to put sand on a beach when it has uh, you know There's some components to it that have a high commercial value. So yeah, this is an interesting topic to To dive deeper into though. Thanks Katrina Yeah, Catherine. I can sorry. I'm going away from the stakeholders and everything. We're going actually back to dina's dino diana a question sort of of that Match mismatch between ecological and environmental or physical sort of scales and and layers maybe and I absolutely sympathize with that problem And it's not an easy one because it could that mismatch can go in either direction If you just take a snapshot of environmental conditions It's probably not super reflective of what sort of type of organisms Trophic interactions and all kinds of things you're finding However, if you go because the lifespan of these organisms is oftentimes not all of them But oftentimes longer than that short snapshot at the same time if you if you you know go more with climate change or You know, decadal projections on the physics or the environment then of course, you know, that doesn't match also what you have observing in that moment in that say in in the ecological frame so Maybe one way around I was just part of a different A different group that actually also interacted with a lot of bone folks on the M bond the marine biodiversity observing networks. We just had a A workshop there and one of the things that was discussed to really Start to rely more on certain modeling approaches And so species distribution models is becoming I mean, it's been out there, but it's becoming more and more a common tool and then habitat suitability modeling So those are some tools that could maybe be explored to try to match these scales together a little bit more I'm not an expert on either one. I'm just throwing this out as potential tools to look into Um Dina we might tell people that we actually incorporated some of that in an experimental project Well, okay. Well, okay, so Working with dina and the people of boom. We had had a contract to create a dynamic model of what might Be contributing to the value of any given particular Patch of sand and we focused on one organism as a hobby horse, which was the the american sand lance Because that was a critical link to a central fish habitat But we could do more of that. I mean not just us but like everybody I I know and we're kind of jumping around between the environmental and and the and the The stakeholder, but I did have a question on the stakeholder one and that's how I'm Given the example of the the the the core of engineers broke it up by county and stuff. There must be a Quite a serious social justice component to that, right? Yeah, how are you guys? weighing the That or is that included in the in the calculations the kind of environmental social justice balance for your stakeholders so um I can't really answer that question um But one thing that I will say is that in our effort to include as many folks as possible We're trying to give them a seat at the table Um, so that at least their voices are heard and it's considered and we were kind of bringing all facets involved um I don't know if I could speak directly to examples and things like that but Hey, this is um, Jessica moundine from the marine minerals program in the gulf. Um Specifically with the core of engineers study. Um, I don't know how much environmental justice Was considered in that particular exercise. Um, they were specifically looking at um their historical use for the counties and then identified volumes and then trying to Determine essentially who is outspending The amount that they had to kind of in a lot of counties as you saw in that figure that graphic a lot are in the red already So they already have less material than what they're anticipating meeting over The lifespan of of that study that they had considered. I don't know how much more detailed that study went into because it really was specific to um sediment budgets Their bank if you will But I do know that with the core in particular They do consider um The the justice component in their planning exercises So they're 50 year planning documents for some of their larger civil works projects do incorporate that as one of the factors that determines the the the economic value of construction of a project is part of The the total the overall calculation They also have a comparable one for the environmental Components where they can calculate a kind of a mock value for environmental value Of a project and they they do that kind of comprehensively as kind of a whole project view So of course our borrow areas by default for projects that would use them kind of get pulled into that a bit But I don't know if it's us. We don't like I haven't I don't know of any where it's directly related to our stuff Yeah, so adding on to jessica. So this paul nor um I think it's worth pointing out that the individual projects are typically Covered by an environmental assessment Not an eis. So consequently the core Doesn't routinely do stakeholder meetings and as much outreach as there would be As part of an eis. I'm not saying there should be yeah, you know Loads of meetings and things but it's just worth Mentioning that because it's a little harder to you know get stakeholder feedback when when you're not having meetings So, yeah, so there's that uh total outside Um, we were talking about the scaling and gathering data a little earlier Uh technological developments. I'll point out for critical minerals. We used a uh a newer technology called sail drone It's an autonomous survey vehicle basically you It's a float with multi beam on the bottom can do some other things and it uh, it's pre-programmed goes out and collects Multi beam very inexpensively over a broad area. So that might be an example of a technology recent technology that could be applied to you know, the sand and gravel program to uh to do repetitive surveys, uh things like that Yeah, no, just I can't but I I I certainly really appreciate your question And I think all of us in boom do And there are you know, there are mandates I mentioned on environmental justice and priorities for tribes Uh in the case of environmental justice mostly what we've done to date In a larger scale is in is concerns offshore wind and it's focused on the new york bike project but we have a number of things like uh A contract report on best practices We've set up these ej forums in respect to new york bite and And I think we're we're hoping that we can expand that throughout boom all of the programs and all of the geographic area And uh, and and for tribal nations As well as the ej question and the tribal nations Are not stakeholders. The I think you know, they They're very sensitive about that. They they're independent sovereign governments Are dependent to actually under the u.s constitution of that so but it's I mean, it's really a good question for us to think about Do we we've got kind of one minute left and then we'll switch over and we'll have have jeff introduce the next Session but go ahead. Yeah, I was just going to suggest that um You you take advantage of that atlas of all the sand resources Take into consideration that sand communities Benthic organisms tend to appear and disappear over the years so that all the habitat is not fully occupied It moves around And if there was any way then to either deal with it at a systems level, you know What is the probability of a given patch being critical or to actually know Somehow that would be good Unless I keep forgetting to identify myself Yeah, and I'm bill brown. I apologize too terrible at that Great. Well, look, thank you very much for that. There's a fascinating presentation. So I really appreciate it And uh, oh there we go And and jeff will I will introduce uh the next uh the next section All right. Thanks kevin. Yes jeff right now over the foam So we're going to pivot now from talking about coastal resilience sand and gravel to critical minerals and this is a an important recent component of our of our program And you know, frankly, it's much different than the work we've been doing with offshore sand and sediment For coastal resilience and it's different in terms of the marine mineral type The location of the deposits and certainly the environmental communities that are associated with the deposits And uh, as you all probably know, we've talked we talked a bit about this yesterday at the beginning of the meeting You know critical minerals is is has been in the news lately, especially In terms of offshore Minerals minerals in international waters, you know in the geopolitical implications of future deep sea mining As we mentioned with uh sand and sediment we're resource managers So it's really important for us to know, you know, where resources may be located Or maybe we don't have any resources on our ocs. We don't even know that at this point in time So our current approach to critical minerals is concentrating our efforts on fundamentally understanding where critical minerals may be located And then also understanding some of the environmental and ecological aspects of those deposits So we I mentioned yesterday, we're we're really resource constrained as a program overall But when we talk about critical minerals and the 3.2 billion acres that we're uh, uh responsible for We have been spending over the last couple years about two and a half million dollars On a program funds on critical mineral research 2.5 million dollars does not go a long way for offshore deep sea research So we're trying to couple that with partnerships with other agencies usgs and noa But also leveraging uh, esp funding So in terms of using program funding to collect resource information At the same time, we're going to use environmental studies funding to collect some environmental information So with that i'm going to turn it over to paul and shannon. I guess paul you're up first All right So i'm paul norum And shannon will chip into shannon cofield We're talking not just about nodules today. Although that is is the primary focus generally For a work given our constrained resources Next slide Or do I do that? Yeah, there we go Okay, so quick agenda Uh overview critical minerals. Where are they? What are they? And a little bit about our regulatory pathway because it's quite a bit different From the free sand that we've been talking about Uh, and then a bit on our current research efforts Uh, as well as a few upcoming projects, uh, as opposed to the projects we've already completed Next slide, please Okay. So what are critical minerals? They're they're hard minerals It's a group of 50 minerals Designated by the us geological survey The minerals up on the graphic that are bolded and yellow are the ones that Are known or believed to be found within the ocs I'll point out Minerals such as gold Which is a valuable mineral and is a hard mineral is not a critical mineral Same with copper copper isn't a critical mineral. It's a hard mineral Everything I talk about today Applies to hard minerals as well as critical minerals Critical minerals just have to focus because of supply chains But these minerals don't occur in isolation. You don't when you pick up a polymetallic nodule It's not just made of nickel. It's made of about 20 different elements So You approach it kind of holistically Critical as well as non critical minerals when you deal with these things Uh, so so really what is a critical mineral? It's a mineral that's essential to us economic and national security different countries have different lists of critical minerals Most countries have lists of critical minerals, but yeah, they don't typically intersect with ours Several of the minerals such as cobalt nickel manganese are critical to the sorry about the pun Or repetition are important to the green energy transition also rare earths the Right hand column is rare earth elements the reason the list expanded from 35 to 50 a couple years ago Was because usgs started listing out the individual rare earths as opposed to lumping them just under the re category Next slide, please okay five main types that We would be working with on the ocs. I'll actually start at the upper right hand corner in the shallowest water so heavy mineral sands this one's typically Not talked about as much in the constant context of deep sea critical minerals because it's a shallow water deposit most beach sands Have some heavy mineral component if you go out to the beach you pick up a handful of sand The dark flecks in the sand Or if you look at the the little wave ripples on the beach if there's you know little dark streaks in those ripples That's either organic material or heavy mineral sands because they're heavier gravity pulls them down Off of virginia some of the shoals have upwards of 10 percent heavy mineral component So 10 percent of the sand is heavy mineral sand the rest is quartz Even down to florida You wind up with One to two percent heavy mineral sands. So there's value in those sands Typically titanium. That's the one worth noting Phosphorites i'll kind of skip over that that's typically within dredgable depths and you would go for phosphorite primarily for fertilizer hydrothermal deposits Internationally they're typically referred to as sms deposits seafloor massive sulfides. Those are associated with hydrothermal vents Basically the black smokers that you've probably all seen footage of The the ore deposit wouldn't be an active sms deposit. We're talking about extinct Vent systems where the activity is stopped Next up is cobalt rich ferro manganese crusts Those are crusts a little less than a foot thick Contain a lot of cobalt manganese. They're they're quite hard Recovering them is makes a lot of noise creates a lot of Let's say ancillary damage because you're basically breaking the crust up off the surface or grinding it up Polymetallic nodules are potato-sized. Well, they vary but typically potato-sized metal concretions That sit on the seabed They form over millions of years. They're found mostly on abyssal plains, although there's an exception I'll talk about a bit later So in waters between three and a half thousand to six thousand meters deep quite deep Hard to research when you're trying to touch the bottom at five to six thousand meter depths Taking a single core sample is basically an all-day event It takes a long time to get get your sampling device down and then recover it Yeah, but but that said pal As far as geographically where these occur from left to right polymetallic nodules are on the deep abyssal plains um cobalt rich crusts are on the Summits and sides of seamounts hydrothermal deposits are associated with spreading centers There's one of those in the united states off of northern california the gorder ridge system Fossil rights are near shore, but typically a little deeper than the sand we dredge and heavy mineral sands are shallow water Next slide, please Okay, uh, you you've seen the slides about the boom jurisdiction. So 3.2 million acres The pink is is where you could find critical minerals, which is pretty much everywhere on the ocs I have more specific maps a little later on Next slide Okay, so perspective maps perspective maps Are developed for models and expert knowledge usgs Collaborates with us or really does does these and They use existing data and expert knowledge It's it's not quite as much of a mathematical model as you might expect There there's a little bit of art to it. So When the perspective map lines are drawn they're they're There's some judgment used The perspective maps indicate areas where minerals could be present based on current knowledge Uh, the colors on this map here The light tan is potential crust the green are potential nodule areas and the Red and black triangles are where you might find those seafloor massive sulfide hydrothermal deposits general trends remote pacific likely has nodules and crusts You can see the you know those colors within the easy areas or ocs areas The atlantic likely has while we know the atlantic has heavy mineral sands Um, probably has nodules And we know it has nodules and crusts on the blake plateau But the new ecs area that pushed off the blake plateau pushes into the deep atlantic There may be nodules there. Um, and then portorico um The northern ocs off of portorico also pushes into the atlantic ocean abyssal area And there were nodules documented there back in the 60s not a lot of recent research Gulf of mexico likely has heavy minerals possibly some brines, uh, so hope Potentially lithium rich we're investigating that There are also nodules in the gulf of mexico, but they're very low grade Due to the sediment influx from the mississippi pacific coast so the western coast of continental united states Has uh phosphates down your california and then those hydrothermal deposits Along gorder ridge that you can see on the map here as those black splotches between orgin and washington and alaska heavy minerals and Sands in the, uh Bristol bay norton sound And then cross deposits up on the chuck chi peninsula in that ocs expansion area and There's could potentially be some nodules south of the Aleutian islands We're doing some work in the allusions looking at hydrothermals Because of course the allusions are volcanic arc. So there's hydrothermal activity there Next slide, please Here's a close-up of the western pacific This is a this is what a perspective map looks like. So you you might see how How there is a bit of art to this The kind of finger-like shape in the middle that's cross-hatched is the Hawaiian Hawaiian island chain There's a potential nodule field that extends into the southern ocs there that's Um We're planning to do some research this fall A cruise out there to look at that. I'll talk about that a little letter later On the right side of the screen the long oblong pale green oval That's the clearing clipperton zone, which is where the international seabed authority has issued most of its leases Next slide, please Okay, so how do you get these minerals when we're talking about um Critical heavy mineral sands you would basically use the same sorts of technology you use to dredge beach sand but for The deeper minerals Specifically for nodules the traditional approach is to use a tracked harvester. So kind of like a Combine harvester or a bulldozer You put it on the seabed two miles three miles down and it Rumbles along on its tracks Scoops up the nodules and those are then slurried to the surface in a in a pipe The nodules are actually friable so they break easily. So on the way up they break down into black sand That's discharged onto the vessel the The sand component the the nodule component is captured on the vessel and then the slurry water is um reintroduced into the system and there's some different thoughts on where you would do that This graphic here has the tailings this charge midwater column. So maybe a mile down other concepts Take it all the way back down and drop the uh that slurry mixture plume mixture down back near the harvester That's the traditional approach There's some more creative approaches this uh impossible metals company for instance postulates and is developing a floating harvester. So This would be about the size of a small dump truck It it's buoyant floats down doesn't actually touch the seabed hovers above the seabed Uses late lasers uh sonar to identify the nodules And then uses various machine learning ai routines to identify which nodules to pick up Because it's imaging the nodules it could see if there's a starfish on a nodule or or some other macro fauna It then avoid that nodule or it could selectively pick up leave behind every 10th nodule for instance So use a little robot arm to pick the nodule up puts it back in a hopper When the hopper's full it floats back up to the surface Uh the company posits postulates using like 30 to 60 of these simultaneously constantly moving up and down recovering nodules Much lower impact method Most likely you're eliminating that plume formation and adding some Ability to add discretion to the nodules that you're picking up instead of just scooping them all up at once Next slide please Okay, so that was a bit about critical minerals and uh, you know how how they're recovered Any questions so far? Yes. Yeah, this is Ruth how many of the vessels Exists internationally, right? We you know from an offshore wind perspective. There's like six vessels that can actually install some of the Sizes of turbine some curious in terms of how many are available To do a lot of the steep extraction So right now this is a hypothetical Field right the work that's been done in the clarion clipperton zone By for example the metals company they have vessels That they work with they aren't necessarily the full-scale vessels that they're they would use when they actually Uh move commercially, right? Uh, I'll point out from an OCS perspective unless I'm missing something it would need to be a us constructed vehicle Jones act all that sort of thing. So As far as I know, we don't have any vessels here not necessarily It would be if that vessel is going to coast wise to coast wise points So if you were extract, I mean this is this obviously is going to create some concerns because you could Come in to the easy and extract and as long as you're not Well Yeah, we'll talk about that in this next section where we talk about regulations and laws Considering we move a lot of big things that aren't us based vessels, but yeah, it's that I know is one of the challenges, right and in this management Right, right. I think that was one of the challenges for offshore wind, right is the Yeah, nothing else Yeah This is Karen Ashton. I just have a little question when I wondered it yesterday, too Can you tell me what is the chukchi peninsula? Okay, uh Can we go back a couple slides to the one with the us map? Right there. Thank you Okay, so you see the Bering Sea between right so north of the Bering Sea There's a submerged peninsula which we refer to it's the chukchi sea Below that is submerged the chukchi peninsula, right? We call that the chukchi cap Okay, and the chukchi peninsula I believe is also that piece of land in russia that sticks out that be the The eastern the western side of Bering St You know they call that chukka too, but the the other side is the seward peninsula But so we were really I was kind of like chukchi peninsula I've never heard the chukchi cap and north wind ridge and stuff called The peninsula before so yeah, that's that's what we called it when when I was on the ship up there. So yeah Anyway, the those ecs cruises push that boundary out to about 350 miles and it falls right along the international day All right. I'm completely aware of that. Okay. I do I work up there. So In catering to that's why we're like so confused about this chukchi peninsula thing because we've never heard it call that and it's not in any of the topography that we've seen okay Slowly noted May adjust my terminology. I've been calling them after like 10 years. So Okay, let's bump up to regulatory Next slide One more Okay, so why are we doing all this? Well outer continental shelves lands act two sections here for your reference. Give us authority for g and g exploration so As well as for mineral leasing Somebody mentioned 8k before Section k in general covers mineral leasing three executive orders from 2017 2020 2021 uh have increasingly drawn attention to and executive put executive focus on critical mineral supply chains You can imagine between 2020 and 2021 during the covid pandemic and the supply chain issues that burn the news every single day there was More attention placed on critical minerals and how they fall into the supply chain Critical minerals aren't really new thing Conceptually the concept goes back to the world war two era so First legislation i've seen was in the 1970s where that term was used But it's really since 2017 where we're kind of that that lens that effort's been Restarted again Next slide please So we have three regulations to uh to cover this 30 cfr 580 covers prospecting 30 cfr cfr's coda federal regulations 30 cfr 581 covers leasing And 582 covers operations What's prospecting prospecting is when you get permission from boom to go out and look for minerals commercially The data boom receives a copy of the data or can request a copy of the data, but it remains proprietary Alternatively if you're not exploring commercially, uh, for example, you're with a university Or your company for whatever reason is spending millions of dollars doing pro bono work You can request a scientific notice or scientific research permit The there's the difference basically falls into How much you might be impacting the seabed with your activities? So if you're going out and you're touching the seafloor and it's federal three miles out except texas and west florida where it's nine miles out You need one of these permits The g and g permit takes a little a little bit of time to acquire Typically 90 days for something really novel like nodule prospecting It might be a little longer than that as we because there's some environmental NEPA work associated with that Okay Great. So you have your prospecting permit you went out. You did all your uh, your g and g prospecting You know where the minerals are what happens next five 30 cfr 581 you can submit an unsolicited request for a lease sale which kicks off a multi-year process where The boom considers an area For lease for specific types of minerals and decides whether or not to proceed on that Obviously oversimplifying this there's a lot of work with stakeholders a lot of NEPA analysis economic analysis And the area would typically be narrowed down and shrunk down to The most suitable area that's then offered up for auction Close bid auction very similar to the oil and gas method With terms and stipulations and royalties built in and at the end of the day then Somebody somebody receives a lease Like I said multi-year process. This is not this will not be a fast process. The catch is if you have all that g and g data That can inform your bid, but it doesn't guarantee That you're going to get a lease so it doesn't provide security of tenure um Okay, so let's say you have your lease now moving on to 582 that set of regulations Covers the actual operations There are regs covering the lineation of mining sites testing equipment as well as the uh mining operations closure plans environmental Monitoring measures all that sort of thing It's worth pointing out. I think when you're looking for minerals without a lease you're prospecting Under us law when you're looking for minerals with a lease you're exploring They're two different terms. They're not the same thing prospecting Pre lease exploration post lease isa uses somewhat different terminology the international seabed authority So uh good to get that straight Once we get the 582 You know decade away If we started now Bessie would certainly be involved through that process Especially once the 582 regs are in Similar to the way they inspect offshore rigs and things like that yes Yeah, before we get off of this this one's fascinating to me so if You come with an application for prospecting One how long what's the window that bone has to reply within and then two multiple groups could get um Approvals to prospect and overlapping locations or does then bone have to trigger some consideration of competitive interests That they would take that to lead like that It it works a little bit different and Oil and gas exploration and production. So I'm curious of how Prospecting to leasing would work here and thinking of You know, typically what happens Or what's happening in the offshore windspace, right? Is no one can select If anybody puts in an unsolicited bid Industry response because they want to drive it to a competitive process Um and go into leasing so I'm trying to you know, if the interest is growing around this one Then how do how does the private sector start? kind of Pushing the process forward I guess right you start to you have one application now You might have people that then just start throwing in stuff for the sake of throwing in something so I'll let Shannon address the timelines for g and g because she's pretty much our g and g specialist um I'll point out the g and g doesn't a g and g permit, right? The g the 580 permit geological and geophysical prospecting permit Is non-exclusive so multiple companies could receive G and g permits to do research in the same area and all you know, collect their own data It is different from the oil and gas model The types of data are quite different you need fairly high resolution seabed data which Is costly to gather you can't gather, you know sub meter bathy from At a 6000 meter depth from the surface so you you need to get an av down there Do your surveys much deeper? Yeah Hey everyone, this is Shannon cofield from boom So to answer the question about g and g timelines for a permit So remember a permit is going to be proprietary data a little bit different than sand and gravel authorizations um that tends to Go through our internal lawyers So it's a little bit of a longer process, but typically for a g and g for exploration. We're looking at 30 to 60 days Stand and gravel it's typically less than 30 days But if we need to consult with our lawyers and get some opinions it could take up to 60 days so Not too long And it could take longer if it's a more complicated Area or an area where there hasn't been work done before I don't think boom would be doing this work in a vacuum without consulting stakeholders You know local governments things like that. Yeah, thanks. So hypothetically say this Takes a A trajectory like offshore wind and you start to get significant interest Then is it a Unsolicited process or you kind of what are you considering from that that transfer from 580 to 581? Okay, so I understand. Yeah. Yeah, so with 581 there's there's a couple separate pathways The unsolicited request process You need to be a qualified requester Which is basically a u.s citizen or u.s corporation the the bar isn't very high to be a qualified requester We've identified some Pieces of the regulation that could probably use a little fine-tuning That that might be one of them, but right in theory anyone can request An unsolicited Lease sale not a lease you can't request the lease you can only request a lease sale Because you know it's a competitive process. So there's that Uh We evaluate that over 45 we have 45 days According to the regs to evaluate the request for a lease sale And reply And our replies then either yes, we will proceed or no, we will not proceed It's a simple yes or no. We have to provide, you know, some limited rationale on that Yeah, the the step after that would typically be an rfi Request for information where we start gathering information from stakeholders and other agencies and the public The alternative path board is the secretary of interior Tells us to develop a lease sale. So those are the two methods Does that that answer your question? Yeah. Yeah, okay. Yeah, so I think we can yes Hey, this is shannon cofield from bowham again. One thing I did want to point out to the group. That's very important. It's a very distinct difference between sand and gravel for I'm just going to stick with g and g because that's my specialty Is for sand and gravel We have a programmatic environmental assessment programmatic ea That covers our sand and gravel activities which makes the process of going through and And issuing an authorization or or permit for sand and gravel g and g G and g is geophysical and geological exploration Makes the process much smoother That does not exist for critical minerals and I think we're going to touch on that a little bit But I did want to point that out that that That is a bit of a challenge When it comes to evaluating a g and g for critical minerals Right go ahead. Yeah, and paul and I I'm just uh It's This might be a good moment to to pause for for our break and let everyone have a stretch and I know I have a critical restroom I have to go so, uh, you're not so let's let's pause here for 15 minutes and we'll come back to your presentation Okay, great. All right Thank you. We'll start off with a quick announcement Karen, please Okay, everybody listen up Well, all right, you don't hear you know Anyway, so I made was able to make a reservation for 20 people at this tango at 6 p.m We are going to be in a semi-private room probably at two tables and they said we could do separate checks So see you there And it opens it's open all afternoon and so if you want to go early and have a drink in their bar that would No Well, I actually had I've had an option of private but it I asked about music and they did with music, but it's the the semi-private area is far away from the music And I just couldn't see us being like locked into a room because I just seemed a little You know, we've been locked into a room all day I thought maybe it would be kind of more fun to have a little feeling of us being out in the world. So That's perfect. Thank you very much. All right. Um, we're ready to go paul. Please proceed. Okay, thanks Perfect One more comment before we jump to the next slide which actually has more details on the 581 timeline um Just want to point out the 580 environmental assessment is currently somewhat ad hoc, right? Because we don't have a programmatic for that or anything like that. So it'd be on a case by case um basis Second point is with the 581 rig. Actually, let's jump to the next slide, please So this is the 581 timeline um Step one on the far left applicant submits an unsolicited request to lease minerals To move from 1a To 1b or 4 to 2 That's 45 days that the agency has to respond To 1a applicants submits to an unsolicited request That's not an agency action Boom isn't committing to to doing anything other than really an rfi and looking a little more Um, so there isn't any formal environmental assessment. It's not a nipa action um It's just a decision over 45 days whether to invest more time and money in Investigating whether it's worth having a lease sale or not Nipa kicks in Right after that. So you do your rfi Right, which usually like a 90 day process. Maybe six months Um, you'll see steps two three and four here adjacent states may form a task force with bone to coordinate and share information It says task force. It isn't necessarily a formal task force. It could be some other sort of formal agreement data sharing meetings Through that process Nipa work is done Also through that process and some of these things Concurrently, uh, you know, not sequentially boom looks at the requested location tracked size Does it's nipa review? There's public involvement typically stakeholder meetings outreach and then At the end of that after several years boom if it decides could issue or propose a leasing notice I'll point out the boom director Signs the letter makes the decision to move from step one a to the next step Beyond that uh into regs. It's typically the secretary of the of the interior that becomes the decider And there are multiple break points where the process can be stopped and just ended so This isn't you know, it's not like pushing a boulder off a cliff where you're starting an avalanche It's more of pushing a steamroller along the road where if you stop applying pressure You stop Um, it's not a foregone conclusion once you start the process So after a proposed leasing notice is issued after several years again governors of adjacent states Which in the territories the territories are considered to be states According to the inflation reduction act amendments to oxla So american samoa guam the government the governors of those territories are for all effective purposes state officials And would be included the same way So they provide comments on the proposed lease sale Uh keeping in mind, they were probably part of the task force that developed the lease sale to begin with After the comments are received and addressed Bone would issue a leasing notice more public meetings similar to the oil and gas process And then there's uh the closed closed bid process auction for seven and step eight after the The bids are reviewed Financial analysis is done A lease is issued Some of the bullets on the bottom there environmental assessment occurs at every step Secretary can stop work the current minimum lease period is 20 years So by the reg leases must be issued for at least 20 years with prescribed terms and conditions um And the terms and conditions could Include things uh environmental mitigations Recovery methodology Royalties all that sort of thing it isn't as formally defined as the oil and gas program So the terms and conditions would probably be a little more robust and specific Uh any there aren't any questions we could go to the next slide Next slide. Yeah, thanks. Okay, so internationally. It's a bit different Bone is only responsible for the OCS Once you're outside of the OCS, it's the international seabed authority, which is part of the united nations They were established in 94 under Unclose, which of course the u.s. Is not a signatory to The isa regulates mineral related activities beyond Any national jurisdiction so international waters high seas Um as the u.s. Yeah, so we do attend Isa meetings, uh, there's typically one or two boom staff along with usgs noa state departments and others That attend the isa meetings, which are three times a year in jamaica But we're observer status as I understand it We typically work our comments through norway or the united kingdom To provide input As I also understand it, uh, not all the nations that participate in in these isa meetings Are vocal or really conveying necessarily Lengthy opinions so the but the u.s. Typically does So just by the fact of us showing up and you know providing comments I think we do have some influence there even though we're not part of the Formally part of the treaty Is there exploration regulations in place Exploitation regulations are still being developed. They were supposed to be done about a year ago, but As I understand it now, it's probably at least another year before those are finished On the map to the right you see that Pale green Rectangle, that's the clearing clipperton zone. So that's the official boundary of the zone Um The purple area the purple Kind of whale shaped airplane shaped area within the ccz. That's the nodule rich area If you look at a close-up of that which is available on the isa website You'll see it's divided into set-aside zones for environment as well as zones for exploitation And those boundaries north and south of the purple polygon are Largely set-asides It's also worth pointing out that it's about as large as the united states. It's it's quite a large Area, I think china has five contracts within the ccz But they have several contracts outside of it as well including It's very close to northern mariana islands within like 30 miles of the ocs there So it isn't just the ccz. There are lease areas all over That said bone doesn't manage that. That's uh, you know, we we just keep track of it internationally NOAA In theory well not theory in fact through the deep sea hard minerals resources act of I think 1982 might be 83 Has leasing authority in international waters. They issued four leases to lockheed martin Back in the 80s before isa was established Two of those leases Lock lockheed still has the other two. I think they've relinquished But no no additional work has been done outside of that internationally under the NOAA authority Next slide please Okay, so shifting a little More into the current research effort. So what are we doing with the two and a half million dollars that we Roughly have each year to Research all this next slide, please Well first we use our strategic priorities. So these five items advance resource evaluation and environmental assessment standards and information assets Assessment of offshore critical minerals understanding a baseline environment Um support technologies That efficiently and cost effectively assess the minerals And provide accessible information on the minerals. So that's that those are the priorities we have For our spending and for our for our effort. You'll see that resource evaluation and environment appears on this Slide several times The marine minerals program leverages much of its funding with The environmental program deep sea work remote work is You know the mobilization costs are so high that it's kind of foolish Not to gather both sorts of information at the same time It's also worth pointing out No, boom is a regulatory agency. So our science informs our decisions. We're not out doing research Well, at least i'm not i'm not out doing research for fun Just for the sake of doing science The science is for the sake of Making decisions about actions. So if there's no resource in an area That that doesn't a lack of a resource kind of disincentivize this incentivizes Um the need to go out to do environmental research in that area Understanding that you know ecosystems are connected and all that But two and a half million dollars. So we're kind of focusing on where the resources actually are Next slide please So here's some of the work that we're doing going to do have done Going clockwise top right Wallops island. So that's a nasa launch facility on virginia beach or on the beaches of virginia There are heavy mineral sands there. I've mentioned those before we're looking at the feasibility of extracting those heavy minerals in the In the course of a beach nourishment project So if you're bringing a million cubic yards of of critical mineral rich sand to the beach to put on the beach Would it be possible? cost-effective economically worthwhile to try to extract at least a portion Of those critical minerals from the sand before you put it on the beach There isn't any particular value to heavy mineral sands on a beach from a protection standpoint versus just having courts The only thing that changes slightly is the color So we're working on that study. Hopefully next year there's a nourishment plan nourishment of wallops the nasa facility plan there next year Next one down the blake plateau Thanks. Yeah, not next. I'll be on this slide for a couple minutes Blake plateau historic test site. There's a slide on this a little later For more detail, but blake plateau 800 meters water depth about 150 miles offshore of say charleston So offshore south carolina georgia 800 meters of water Mangan the we have crusts there and nodules. That's very unusual. You usually don't find those in 800 meters of water The nodule quality isn't as rich Tip overall as deeper pacific nodules, but there are There are certainly critical minerals in those nodules in 1970 deep sea ventures Did some test mining there? They this was in a very early optimistic period of deep sea mining So 1970 they went out and tested multiple methods of recovering nodules What you see here in the small blue Area next to the robot arm is a nodule track. I think I have a better picture of it a little later But basically they plowed along collected some nodules pushed some aside as the their bulldozer collector moved along the seabed so That's we're planning to use that as a recovery experiment basically to go back and document recovery ecological change differences from the non Tested areas versus the tested areas Next one down Gulf of Mexico salt brines. So there are A number of salt brine deposits on the deep seabed of the Gulf of Mexico say 2000 meter water depth. These are very saline brines that can be hundreds of meters deep Um We are curious What what as to what the mineral composition of the salt is? typically the only available information on these sub submarine salt brines is that There's a salinity value that doesn't really tell you about the lithium content or anything else So we have a trip planned this fall through university of southern miss university in mississippi To recover salt some fluid from the salt brine and do an analysis of it They've been studied, you know, I wouldn't say intensely, but they've been studied ecologically. So there's usually Muscle colonies and things like that methanophiles that Are around the salt brines, but the brines themselves other than perhaps some bacteria Pretty much devoid of any sort of life because the salt layers are so high Next over tech development We're working with a couple companies one in particular impossible sensing Which is a company that works with JPL as well. They develop probes and sensors for interplanetary probes The idea is can we apply some of those spectrophotometric methods To the deep sea so basically as opposed to bringing a nodule up to do an assay in the lab Can we send the probe down the spectrometer down to shoot a laser do a little ablation? And then get a spec reading and do at least on a gross level Do an assay of what the potential mineral content is? Uh, that would be far more cost-effective than then bringing nodules to the surface again considering the Transit time of dropping a box core and bringing it back up That's just one example. We have a couple similar efforts Hawaii abyssal plane that cruise is scheduled for September of this year and that's basically to go to the very southern end of the big island of Hawaii To not to the southern end to go to the southern extent of the ocs offshore of the big island of hawaii And do some box coring other work as well but Part of the the goal is to bring up box cores of nodule samples along with you know, some of the small biota there In part this is This is definitely resource and environmental exploration. We don't know if there's nodules there We suspect there might be because that clearing clipperton's own prospective area abuts the ocs And there isn't any particular reason why it should stop at the ocs. There probably would be nodules in that area We did some science there a few months a couple months ago back in november We gathered some multi beam in the area to Fill in some of the data gaps Hone in on areas where where we could do some further research Moving up eskin obitroff gorda ridge. That's the arrow. That's Pointing from the what 30 degrees west over towards the pacific coast This was a usgs bone no accrues on the Well, it doesn't matter. Um, we use the j rv jason and the auv sentry and tandem to collect uh, bathy on the deep seabed and then Collect physical samples what you see there hanging over the side of the ship. It's about the size of Maybe a minivan That that's the jason goes down went down about 3000 meters looking for these hydrothermal vents And it's controlled from the ship from a control van on the on the vessel and we were able to recover samples many biological samples Water samples, but also some mineral samples for example in the image here. That's a piece of extinct chimney copper rich Then the top image is the western elution seamounts I mentioned sail drone earlier today. I think that image there is their largest sail drone. It's about 60 feet long That deployed about a year and a half ago in the western elutions to look for hydrothermal areas in preparation for another cruise a follow-on science cruise next year where we plan to go to some of these potential hydrothermal areas to Do ecosystems analysis and look at the resources This one's also led by usgs on this particular map that So the asv collected just over a course of a few days this particular Slice of bathy that you see here very high quality data It's you know, it's doing its own thing controlled from I think the control centers in st Petersburg, Florida So there's somebody on a keyboard You know telling it where to go adjusting for the winds it has a has a sail and sail drone to catch the wind It also has an engine inside. You know the winds not favorable It was actually gathering data during a gale that blew through so this thing is really robust And because of the size of this platform can work in deep seas despite the waves and everything Any questions about these these are all our For the most part projects are either locked in very near term or that we've completed Okay Next slide Okay. Yeah, I guess I have a couple more slides. Okay, so here's eskin avatroph. That's the jason rov mentioned that That's the minivan size thing Drops down a couple miles on a cable. I think the at maximal operational depths like five and a half thousand meters So can get to those abyssal depths I didn't put the black tape on the the sentry but the thing with the smiley face. That's the sentry. It's about Maybe two meters high It's autonomous. So you program it put it into water and then collect it about 18 hours later It works really well deploying these two in tandem That was a lesson we learned because you can gather very good bathy Which then lets you very precisely pick a target site for the jason keeping in mind that These areas are largely uncharacterized or unexplored. So the bathy is not very good to begin with What did we find down there hydrothermal vents sediment beds? Copper seemed to be the primary mineral this isn't well, yeah We were on this particular mission targeting more of the extinct or Vents or vents that were going extend extinct Cruises in earlier decades were focused on the more active systems. So these are the systems that are Less active or in some cases completely inactive. How do you determine that? There's a temperature probe on the jason you you know, you you find the water and you poke it in And if the water is not hot, then it's pretty much extinct And that usually coincides with your pillar your black smoker not having anything growing on it Because there's no nutrients coming out Next slide, please Okay, so this is a study we have planned for next year Definitely welcome input on this one The leads on these it's again usgs usgs is a big partner for us in this case This is more ecological or usgs resource partners tend to be out of Santa Cruz Amy Gartman, Kira Mazzell Experts on critical minerals that operate out of there for this study. It's Amanda demopolis out of the usgs center in Gainesville, Florida And what we plan to do there you can see on the image to the right. There's that test track I was talking about there are many kilometers of of these tracks A couple of years ago, 2022, we documented the area with Huggins AUV and collected upwards of half a million high-res photos Gathered just off the the seabed at 800 meters fine-scale bathy sub-bottom side scan That's all being stitched together. It's almost finished as a data product and Back in the 1980s usgs went out took a bunch of photos of the area And found some of the mine tracks and put down some patio block blocks So basically the the paving material you'd use in your backyard in the patio They dropped those with numbers written on them. We were able to locate. I think all of them So that's a good initial step once we start recovering those or investigating those as far as recovery processes sedimentation things like that they make a nice control But in the upcoming experiment for next year and a year after What we'd like to do is document that ecological recovery Set up a set of flexible recovery experiments Our funding is clearly limited So we can't really commit to going out to Blake every other year for the next decade That's not going to work But what we can do is set up a set of experiments that could be retrieved kind of ad hoc when a ship happens to be in the right area We could pay a little extra to retrieve the experiment So that that's what we're kind of thinking as a longer-term experiment And also from the resource side Because it is marine minerals. We will continue delineating the resources Uh, we you know, we have a we know there are nodules there, but what's the density? What what are they? What's the value? How far is the extent? And importantly what what habitats surround this area? There are cold water corals And other ecosystems and habitats in this area but not within necessarily the nodule rich area water currents bottom currents Uh This isn't as I understand it from industry. This isn't really a High this would not be considered a high priority target. The nodules just aren't worth that much There might be an offset because they're in shallower water and they're fairly close to shore But the value of them is is not commensurate with ccc nodules or cook island nodules for instance the image on the left I think this is worth pointing out too. So the little bulldozer there that you see that that's the test mining site in general a few square kilometers um That perspective model I mentioned for nodules. That's that's where the perspective module nodule model Shows nodules tongue twister there. Sorry You can see it doesn't coincide it kind of highlights the fact that these perspective models are models, right? They they Shouldn't be taken too literally. They only indicate that they're the conditions are They're set for a resource to be present doesn't mean it is doesn't mean it isn't so this particular site is outside of the perspective area Uh, the faint orange line that runs through that perspective area, which is the the salt and peppery looking area That's the old ocs boundary When the eez or when the ocs was extended by the expanded continental shelf, that's the bright yellow line So that's the new area, which is There's certainly data out there You know unh state department gathered a lot of noa gathered a lot of information to provide the justification to extend the ocs But they weren't focused on nodules on the seabed, right? They're looking at deep geology the roots of the crayton that sort of thing so So that could be a potential Study area in the future Are there resources out there in this area? which is perspective for nodules and Extends into much deeper water the eastern side there Goes into several thousand meters of water depth because at that point it's in the abyssal plain that's Next slide Okay, uh, so more Let's say policy or regulatory focus studies that we have that don't involve, you know paying a million dollars for a ship um This critical minerals environmental assessment framework. This is uh, this made the national studies list 300 000 and has matching funds Or leveraging funds from operational funds from marine minerals um And the idea with this one Or I think we're deferring it to next fiscal year just because we've received our funding so late But is to engage the national academy to identify information needs peculiar peculiar to the deep-sea mineral minerals environment and the actions that would take place there activities To help identify which baseline environmental parameters should be gathered or prioritized And then also to review existing information To look for information gaps basically help us figure out what we don't know and what we need to know from a studies perspective um So identify needs data gaps associated mostly with nodules maybe with heavy mineral sands um Keeping in mind the the budget right and we don't we rather have a good product for a limited scope instead of generic information for a much broader scope I or maybe you know, that's that's where you could weigh in with the other Would the reverse be uh preferable? Also assessment needs specific to critical mineral prospecting leasing and operations They have three very different impacts Uh prospecting You're recovering small quantities of nodules But most of the work with prospecting involves an auv gathering Low energy geophysical data. So it it isn't really impactful in the sense that a g and g oil and gas survey would be where you're firing off boomers and trying to get deep seismic data Deep seismic doesn't matter much for a nodule. It's sitting on the seabed So like I said, just a very different approach different needs Leasing, uh, well that that's definitely more of a programmatic bigger picture Economic impacts things like that and then operations. That's again Focusing on a specific site. What is this recovery technology going to how is this going to impact? The seabed the environment the ecology and not downstream impacts Also, what's needed to document the environmental baseline Like I said, this This proposed massum study is much more focused on the study side help us develop studies There's another the next slide has a separate project That's more focused on developing those baseline requirements the more operational aspects Does that That makes sense they they kind of work together addressing separate needs There aren't any questions here Next slide please Yeah, I'm just wondering Paul is there a routine protocol for For biodiversity like edna or something like that That is incorporated into Any of these exploratory activities? I wouldn't say it's routine, but for example on the sail drone Mission and I believe on escanaba we gathered edna and data with both of those. I think m barry was our partner there And I think they're still processing the samples keep in mind That escanaba gorda trough cruise to that was still on the tail end of coveted So everything was still backed up. I think we're finally unraveling that I think in the future that's that's one of the things that could be part of a protocol for sure Acoustics all those sorts of things Especially given these remote environments. We want to gather, you know, it's so expensive to get out there You want to gather as much information as possible get as many collaborators? You're not just going to pick up a nodule. It's you want You want the full picture when you go out there? most bang for the buck and The advantage of that actually winds up being that Other agencies are also interested in collaborating because they see that opportunity as well I think mark mueller's online he's he's part of our He's an integral part of the team and Is hey mark. Do you want to jump in talking? Yeah, sure. I was putting comments in the chat too, but yes, that's crack sail drone surveyor and barry They're working on processing that right now And tom ergan's common is correct. That was just surface water for that one But in hawaii last year, we actually collected throughout the water column and at the seafloor with this Pretty cool benthic lander the deep autonomous profiler and usgs. Sean Morrison is working on processing those samples So edna whenever we can we we like to collect it. It does provide useful distribution information and it's one of the environmental Uh programs areas of interest to do that one more possible Thanks mark I think mark's a no mech co-chair. So That positioning really helps us with our collaborations with a lot of a lot of the potential partners Was that where you're yeah, okay I'll also point out i'm a geologist So I have a somewhat holistic background. I did ocean acidification and worked with benthic flora and stuff like that so so I get the environmental piece but One of the things we're looking at to kind of you know, build up our bench build our critical minerals team is to add a dedicated environmental person to manage these sorts of projects You know, I can do the contracting piece, but Honestly, even if I were fully competent with something like edna just the optics of having your critical minerals geologist Managing the environmental component. It's it's just it's not good, right? So Yeah, see you laughing there bill Okay, uh, this is Megan. I'll add we're also looking at a deep sea ecologist to be added in the next couple years Yeah, I'm staying constant. I just wanted to follow up on that because obviously If you know, so if you're showing us how little we know about the geology of the deep sea Then the extra it doesn't take much to to realize what little we know about the biology of the deep sea and And I say that I've sat on a lot of marine biodiversity Working groups and I don't do deep sea stuff, but I'm always hearing how little we know And so it just it's good to hear that you guys are Appreciating that because if you're ever going to do the environmental assessment We have to know something about what's out there and I guess that's part of Part of the the Challenge is you're you're just trying to figure out what's out there Mineral-wise And the biology is much more complicated in terms of not just the there's this resource But the interactions of all the different things and so it is Extremely challenging and of course we all know that Things in the deep sea happen very slowly And and so yeah, it's it's a challenge. I'm it's good to hear you Are embracing that but I also would say From a basic science It's tremendous opportunity to learn about this ecosystem, which we know so little about Thanks, and I agree completely You know, it's actually let me just say we Geologists are definitely appreciated and and And we are you're right Dan, but we we are keenly interested in and using the environmental studies program and to support you know environmental work You're just jumping in here and more or less echoing what Dan was saying I just when you earlier you said okay, so we know if they're active or not by probing the temperature and everything And if they're not then we're not having This specialized community anymore like the chemosensitically based community and that's that's correct but It is a hard structure in a vastly soft sediment dominated system And so the critters will still go there They might not be based on chemosynthesis anymore, but you will still have a very rich biological community on those even extinct smokers and everything so I do think yes, there there is this need for biological assessment in those areas as well Agreed and uh Out at Escanaba, uh, I was definitely there more as an observer, right? watching things happen, but Between the hydrothermal outcrops. It's basically gray mud. There isn't a whole lot going on There's occasional methane seeps and there are some muscles associated with that and you know, there was a beer can and you know a couple other little little things, but the light Yeah, beer can wasn't from us. It was We got a picture somebody could probably date it think uh What's that bud Yeah Two models deep 100 miles offshore. It's everywhere. Um, where am I going with this? So Those hard area outcrops the the ones with warmer water definitely had higher you know As a geologist looking at a tv screen looked like they had higher by biodiversity And the lower temperature ones are the ones with none had much lower, but it wasn't There was fauna there. It just wasn't as lush or diverse as as on the hotter areas And there's a trend from north to south In temperature. So things like that could inform, you know decisions about it Honestly, it's the only spreading center on the outer continental shelf I'd be kind of surprised if that became a leasing target just from a habitat standpoint and everything like that But it's it's worth investigating because it's a resource and it, you know informs us It's a known area, you know been of interest for at least 40 years First go to missions. We're back in the 80s Okay So the second study Is not see me which is with the national academy. This one is to develop environmental assessment methods So environmental evaluation of critical and hard offshore mineral programmatic reference. So basically building up a document set of baselines standards to help inform environmental assessments Like most government agencies we have timelines we have to operate under and for unusual types of work Unusual activities like this it would be helpful to have standards and references in place Easily accessible As opposed to you know trying to piece all this together from journal articles or Or from other countries or is a documents. I mean that that's not how we want to do business So the idea with this particular study is to gather those materials into a boom Um boom document basically Um, and this again, this is not something, you know, I'll be running. Um You want to talk about this one a little shannon sure this is shannon cofield from boom Um, I am also a geological oceanographer. So this is not my specialty But the SMEs within boom that wrote this some of them may be online. Um Are very qualified in their in their education. So I did want to say the the emphasis in this one is to do a desktop study Collect a couple of these pieces up here and I can go into details on some of these very generally Since we haven't so we haven't actually gone out for To solicit this study yet, but the goal is to develop Some sort of environmental guidelines That will guide us developing the regulations So we're not asking the team or the academics or whoever we get for this study to develop Federal regulations, right? That's completely outside of the scope of their expertise I will say that this is paul. I think mentioned it very quickly. This is phase two Phase one We are about to publish on our website and they don't necessarily go together directly But they do complement each other and phase one was a desktop resource evaluation Of all of the known critical minerals and hard minerals within US federal waters They did also include the extended OCS Even though they didn't have to in the beginning. So we have a really nice comprehensive report Which will be available for the public to take a look at it probably within the week or so So that's Overview on this one if anyone has specific questions on this as we roll along and be happy to answer what I can answer Okay, so in summary the previous slide focused more on the studies aspect This slide this project focused more on the assessment Side Next slide, please There's only like a one or two slides left. So you're almost done with me Okay, some additional research possibilities Uh So the marine minerals resources research act from 1996 Was well was passed in 1996. It's congressionally Mandated but not fully funded. The goal of that mm r r a Resort, I'll just call it the research act was to provide to Gather information about marine mineral resources in an environmentally responsible manner In order to do that Three marine mineral technology centers were opened University of mississippi, which was focused on continental shelf regions. So these are I imagine, you know A lab, right? So a room within a department at a university So university of mississippi focused on the continental shelf Which makes sense given the, you know oil and gas component and the gulf and the proximity of the new miss University of hawaii at minoa Focused on deep seabeds and nearshore island environs and University of alaska fairbanks was focused on the arctic and cold water regions in general Those are closed at this point. So they were open for a bit. They did some work some more than others, but you know funding basically caused those to close that being said The law still in place and the law apparently gives us grant authority for research and development related grant authority, which is We the boom doesn't typically exercise related to marine mineral resources and associated environmental aspects So We're thinking This would be worth looking into um, it would give us some Some ways of working with partners that are more difficult through the traditional competitive contracting things like that um But we need to you know Figure out the thread the needle on this because uh developing a new procurement method and convincing Uh, you know the the people that do procurement to actually implement it is uh can be challenging um I I think yeah, so stay tuned for that But that could be a an avenue for us Next slide please Okay, uh, and I believe this is the last slide and these were some primer questions on you know to to Divide food for thought for discussion, uh, although I'm not sure they're really necessary. There's probably already a lot of that so I'll wrap it up there and you know happy to take questions or anything like that All right, paul. Thank you very much. Um Yeah, it's a and it's a good uh Good spread of questions too. So we'll put it to the committee if they can Take a shot at any of the questions or have questions of their their own dan you're uh You're up I was waiting for an entree to talk about marine mammals You you have uh the issue of deep diving whales and I would say that the deepest dive is on the order of 2000 meters and it's most of them are working around a thousand meters and anything beyond that is is pretty occasional so, I mean that's a starting point and The the other thing I was going to say about the whales is There's an increasing understanding of whale falls as island as islands of resources that that concentrate things on the deep ocean floor And that's an interesting ecological component But the other thing I I'm thinking about is if you guys are doing these broad Surveys of large swaths of the ocean It's a great opportunity to see how common these whale falls might actually be And one of the arguments is because of the whaling the historical whaling the whale populations are depleted and we've significantly reduced those islands Resort that resource of whale falls as islands to hopscotch across the the bottom would be interesting To have some you know, if you guys are doing a large-scale survey where you're just looking at the bottom It would be interesting to see how often or if you even see whale falls Yeah, this is Katrin Um, so we are going with a biology route here and picking the other one of that of that block there authentic Animals or organisms Jack and I were actually just sort of whispering in the background here One of the things that's also we just talked edna as probably a very powerful tool But edna only works as well as the library you have to compare your sequences against so I think actually that the deep sea and particularly the hydrothermal vent community Was very groundbreaking and and using genetic tools and whatever But I think it's really important to make sure that you have a good meta barcoding library So that edna can become that powerful tool that it can be If you know what you're comparing it to so That's also maybe one priority to create that library so that in the future, you know, you you know what you're looking at Thanks. Yeah, so I I think for example, I think a lot of the escanava samples are being processed by amanda demopolis and it I'm pretty sure part of that process includes edna barcoding and I believe That some of those samples are then sent to the smithsonian to the bone funded repository there Do we also gather edna there or or publish that or is that separate if that makes sense? I Actually what I get what I'd say I think this is a great point we're and we are We're keenly interested in expanding the use of edna and we're linking it to a number of our studies and actually it's it's pretty clear isn't it that You know like deep-seated ad mining and actually dredging of minerals in general is like a great opportunity to take samples on that The one I'm not sure about you get me thinking is that you know, you It's becoming much easier to sequence more DNA than in the past and and And DNA sequences have long been sent to gen bank and I actually I haven't thought about the connection there, but it's something worth thinking about that we as part of our research funding we Then would require sampling and some The edna samples basically a parcel of water and you analyze the dispersed Fragmental DNA in there But what I was talking about is the meta genome part Barcoding where you actually sample a piece of an organism and you identify it and then you match a sequence with a name And then you can match that edna Sequence to that So it's a multi-step process, but maybe you're doing this all this already. I I just Yeah, well, I think we are familiar with that I'm not sure we're systematically Doing what you're suggesting. It's probably a good idea and our role would not be to you know support the maintenance long term of a of a data bank for You know barred coding like the Smithsonian's doing but we can I mean, I think we certainly can and appreciate your suggesting it Sort of you know in a way that's really efficient contribute to that There's one more thing the reason why this is also important I mean edna even if you don't know what it what it is you can't match it to something It will still tell you something about the diversity in the system But I think this is also or these are systems where there is a very high Um potential of new species and things like this. So you don't want to miss that opportunity, right? I less Kauffman Boston University. Um, I remembered. Oh, yeah, I'm no brown. Excuse me Along those same lines though We're experiencing a massive accumulation of sequence data in the absence of systematists And it would be really important not just to take pieces of organisms but to take organisms and have People supported who actually studied them as organisms Not as nucleic acid And this is an enormous opportunity, but we have to make sure that the people are there to do the work So I mean, you're you're preaching to my heart and my past experience as a museum director and yeah but So every so what less that is clearly correct. But again, you have to realize our Our our budget is limited. So there's we can hire people and we can do We can you know, we can use the studies program to support people who are systematists, but they're but we're It's kind of limited It's a dwindling pool There was also some chat comments that there seems to be quite a bit of ongoing work with the smithsonian. So that's great And the us Yeah, we all noted we we uh, we've been long supporting uh actually the maintenance of the collection of Of organisms some deep in the sea they are principally worms of one kind or the other but some of them are very attractive worms And uh, and then we're linking that to the you know, the the the frozen collection and uh, and and barcoding work Sorry, this is rodney collect I just add to that just for a second You know, we uh, we have been working with the smithsonian natural history museum for some time There was a About diversity summit not that long ago at the natural history museum as well. And I really think that You know, uh, they're expanding their freezers collections. They're taking all these samples. They're adding more staff. They're doing more sequencing You know, it's no it's bone. It's usgs You know, it's it's other agencies navy what was involved as well I think people really understand the importance of this and what it can lead to And uh, from what I understand our long-term 40 year relationship with the invertebrate group there Is it will will continue to grow and expand I think there an agreement as we are too Thanks And there's at least one cute organism down there Karen c cucumber Karen asked you um edna is great for diversity, but we can't forget you have to ask the right question because it doesn't tell you anything about abundance And so you're not going to know how many are there it also doesn't tell you what life stages they are so if you have An area that's being recolonized you might earlier life forms stages you if you're if it's actively being recolonized or maybe you're getting the It's called the uh The larvae in the water rather than the Cecil form from the edna You're not going to know that by just looking at edna and so You could be looking at an area that Has just a few of the same diversity of organisms that you had in the past And it isn't recovering or you could be looking at an area that is recovering So you need more more than just edna it compliments other approaches and you have to ask the right questions It is not the God's gift to the to everything so don't forget that Hey, so I just want to point out when we're looking at nodules on the deep seabed um Okay, so we don't have much money to do that but We need to be fairly close in order to see them on geophysical data So one of the things I am trying to incorporate into our work related to that is always to gather imagery video footage because if you're running an auv along the seabed Doing g and g five meters up. It isn't that hard to strap a gopro or a more expensive gopro that can work three miles deep To gather geo reference data that you can then use for For some of that taxonomic Work, I understand a little the large things and not for the info anything in the sediment So you're just seeing stuff that's sitting on the surface and there's probably a limit to how Small a thing you're going to be able to see and so You know the diversity in the deep sea is much greater than just the macrophon I I was struck by the You know when you were we were talking about the nodules and and the the harvesting that was done back in the 1970s and that you can still see the line there so earlier in the meeting we we we talked about the environmental impact And in the in the nearshore and in the sand where it seemed to be Uh very very limited in time, you know through through four months and it was Backwards here you're dealing with completely the opposite problem and you've got something that's Lasting 50 or 60 60 years So it's it's going to take, you know right within your Kind of group it's going to take two completely different ways of looking at the environmental impact right and I mean deep sea mining right or nodule recovery You're mining. I mean that is the impact right there's there's no way around it. You're removing the nodules So you're altering the habitat those nodules those tracks are going to be there pretty much permanently Because nodules take millions of years to reform and right now usgs is you know studying Growth and others are studying the growth rates of the nodules specifically out at blake There's a lot of good paleoclimactic information in those slowly accreting layers Tell you about the you know ancient climate regime things like that But yeah, there's no way around the the fact that you're removing A hard substrate from the seabed, you know, we're aware of that so From an agency perspective one of the you know one of the Areas we need to look at is what what can we do to mitigate that you can't remove the nodule? But you can't not remove the nodule if you're trying to remove the nodule, right? So do we replace it with something? Do we have set-aside areas? Do we only allow every other nodule to be picked up using some of these lower impact methods? That sort of thing and what's the what's the impact and that's part of what this blake plateau study will look at Is the biodiversity the in fauna the the benthic forams all that sort of thing within the tracks And adjacent little piles along the tracks versus the areas outside of the mined area Is there really a difference? Well, obviously there will be but what is that difference and how can that be mitigated or managed? You know responsibly so Yeah, Dan cost again. You guys have a I mean, I'm thinking about the role of passive acoustics and some on some of these Areas that you know, you're going to be looking at for a period of time and you guys have a acoustics Center has that been put into this year? I assume you're already thinking about that Probably won't mean to answer that But you can if you want to The answer is I think no at this point. Uh, but it's an interesting Thing to think about actually I'd like to hear more and and uh, but we you know, we've uh, we focused heavily on Uh, originally sort of seismic survey type issues for oil and gas and now almost all the focus is on offshore wind which is taking up everyone's time right now, but you know the concept is Can I ask you so what do you think what do you think we should look for? Well pacific, I mean both I mean the soundscape is an important baseline and you mentioned that some of these Mechanisms are going to be noisier than others. So it's the added noise to the environment, but it's also the the soundscapes tell you a lot about what's there at least what's making noise and so Obviously it has to be things that are making noise for you to hear them, but there are a lot of things that That are the big I mean a lot of the deep diving whales are making noise Using both sonar which is challenging because it's high frequency Which means that need a lot of bandwidth to to to bring in to archive those data The the other thing that's interesting is that there has been an initiative to instrument deep-sea cables the telecommission cables with acoustic receivers With you know, the idea is it wouldn't take that much more effort since you're already laying these cables to put these sensors out And if that happens I don't know the status of that, but that would give a tremendous ability to take in Soundscapes of the deep ocean because those things as you know are going everywhere It would also be a tremendous amount of data coming through that would you'd need automated systems to to characterize, but You know, there's fish that makes noise. There's there's I doubt that there's dawn and dusk choruses in the deep ocean, but you know, I there are there might be some sort of patterning to the acoustic environment and and I don't even know what's how much has been done in the deep ocean for these acoustics Um, I'll point out we did purchase a couple shallow water hydrophones recently that we plan to deploy on Most of the upcoming work, but just on a very limited surface basis Just under the concept of if we're on the ship. What can we bring? Well, if we can't bring anything else We can bring a couple hydrophones and at least gather some data in a really remote area that no one else is going to I don't know how useful the data will be. I'm not an acoustician, but I imagine something's better than nothing Uh, you know, we can't strap it to an rov going down 6 000 meters. It's kind of out of our budget Those tend to cost more Laurie It's probably easy to collect the data. It's it's another thing to analyze it and it takes some fairly sophisticated approaches to actually Work with the data sets because they're large and it's and it's it also depends on what you're looking for but Getting it's the first step. Yeah, ultimately. I think we'd want to work with partners on that or or the CMA Just quickly because I admit it's a follow-up really So, I mean, it's very interesting, but I did mention it yesterday, but maybe to note we And I'm sure Dan does it were very involved in In an effort to deploy a whole grid on the in the Atlantic for passive passive acoustic monitoring that relates to offshore wind and actually the Erica Statterman who's our scientist It's leading it is she did her phd on fish noise, you know, the sea So this would be music to her ears and we are We have an alternative to a direct regulatory requirement of monitoring by the companies that we are developing and I'm optimistic will adopt where I where the companies will have have the option of contributing funds to our studies program and then we would pool the funds with a sophisticated manager of the system to deploy instruments and to make sure that and so instead of having a patchwork of just some hydrophones on leases that less leases establish we could have a Not a deep sea Array but in a very large array that really would have us understand things broadly there and the quick answer probably is that Uh, that's so much further ahead in terms of development that yeah I think uh lorry and then deb Hi, this lorry summa. I just have a quick question about lithium You mentioned lithium brines at the seafloor but there's a tremendous amount of commercial interest onshore and subsurface lithium brines and I just wonder if you expect that activity to ramp up offshore and whether you need to be involved in assessment of those offshore subsurface brines That was one of the the spurs for the salt brines project In deep water that we're talking about was you know, argentina basically filters salt brine rich water Through a set of filters to pull the lithium out, right? It's a lot like remediating a gas station for petroleum same concepts So what we're focused what i'm focused on with this particular project Which is managed out of the gulf for salt brines is just assessing what the composition of the salt brine is There's so little information on that it's kind of an oversight People measure the salinity, but they don't actually measure what's in the salt. It's more than just sodium and chloride In the gulf those salts Forgive me. I'm not an oil and gas geologist But I think those salts are tied to the luan salt layer which you know form some of those salt domes for the the Oil reserves things like that So there's likely to be more than just salt and chloride in the water or in that In that brine Some of these pools are quite deep And you know extensive on the surface So there could be a significant volume of for example lithium in there Because they aren't really biologically rich As far as i'm aware of, you know, it's a very very high salt environment If a method could be developed of pumping the pumping the water up removing the salt The lithium and pumping the rest of the salty water back down Um Well, that seems like a relatively low impact method of recovering salt points. So Does that answer your question? Yeah, I was thinking about the the subsurface brines as well But characterizing the sea floor brines is certainly a good first step to understanding the subsurface brine Yeah, yeah, I mean i'm i'm aware of you know lithium brines like out in nevada and places like that, but you know, it's definitely outside of bone's authority. So But we keep track of that because there's you know, we have to look at terrestrial Analogs and also from an environmental aspect. It's you know, you need that for that cost benefit terrestrial mining versus activities on the deep sea Thanks Deb looks in national academies So going back to a comment that dan made about data collection versus data analysis There's a tremendous amount of video taken near hydrothermal vents and on the abyssal sea floor From things like alvin for the last 40 years much of which has never really been analyzed for Anything other than the specific use that it was there for at that time, you know looking at A specific thing is there any way to think about working with other agencies to try to analyze some of that old data That's probably archived and not being used I think that's definitely worthwhile A few years ago. I was at usgs and we were looking at Video footage from I forget to name the pipeline, but it was a pipeline from louisiana across the west florida shelf into tampa bay And basically that was you know sitting there with videotapes and documenting the organisms you saw Foot by foot along along the video transact So there's definitely value in that of course, it's expensive but with you know and bone's roll might not be to Well, I don't know. I'm being hypothetical here, but maybe our approach Better might be to fund research into ways to automate that process You don't need a bunch of grad students staring at a video screen documenting tube arms That could be done with you know machine learning algorithms things like that I I tend to I always think you need grad students staring at Well, maybe a little bit Yeah, follow up Dan cost again M. Bari has made a lot of progress in that area. I mean for years they It was amazing. They would visually they'd have people scan their videos from the ROV's There's a couple of folks that are developing some very sophisticated sophisticated AI methods of looking at deep-sea benthic critters and and automatically identifying them and at the very least Calling them out that says you should look at this but to have my last They just gave a presentation a month or so ago that I was at and it was quite amazing How far that technology and how far it's advanced and and I'm pretty sure the and barry folks are on the leading edge of that I think we have drew remson in our environmental program. I think used to work on that sort of Flow through rapid machine learning pattern recognition stuff too So, yeah, that's I mean some interest to us, but two million dollars, right? So it's like how do we spend the money best? Yeah, and we're we're doing a using objective identification AI for From he was looking at images from birds and marine mammals to invite us doing it and and I I have the same reaction that that This could be an interesting AI type question, you know So we're almost out of time Okay A couple of quickies one paul Um I'm naive about this, but what's the story with methyl clathrates? And is there any danger of disturbing them or releasing carbon in the process of deep sea mining? And then I have another question after that quickly So I don't know Okay, I don't that's as simple as I know what they are And I know the you know the danger of disturbing them and the methane release Creating explosions all that sort of thing But honestly, I I don't know what the intersection is between nodules specifically and methyl clatter It's like if they they occur in the same areas that sort of thing But that might be a hazard that we would need to you know map out as part of leasing And the other thing is just a quick recommendation I'm in order to fully understand the significance of biodiversity in the nodule fields It might be good to encourage Uh People doing studies to sidle up onto island slopes and seamounts Because we really don't know What's going on there or what the general context of biodiversity is we've been I've peripherally involved in exploring Kirbos And we we keep finding new things on the island slope that extend on to the abyssal plan All right last last comment to Well, Lori was oh, okay This is actually a little outside, but I thought I would share it that on cnn this morning I was reading a new article that was Basically the tidalist deep sea expedition captured stunning images of preachers in the pacific mining zone and it is in the Now the clarion clipperton zone and it's um, they just found a bunch of things I mean actually you always do and so this whole idea of mining versus biodiversity and everything I just wanted to alert people that there's a new paper or a new article out Thank I think with that we'll have to wrap it up, but thank you everyone. It's been a great great meeting I I did a calculation. It seems like there's for your your program There's one dollar for every 1,280 acres. Is that I think it's like a tenth of a cent tenth of a cent per acre Yeah Yeah, so that definitely could use a little more funds given how critical critical minerals are and so so But uh before we break I like thank you everyone for their their participation. They're open and honest Conversations, I'd like to particularly thank the national academy of science staff Jonathan Zoe Deb Caroline online for for supporting us and giving us such a great meeting and It was just a pleasure and so we'll we'll see you later later this afternoon for hopefully a conversation of beverage and some food. Hey and With that, I I guess we'll break for lunch. Thank you very much