Almost two hundred years ago, a flotilla of six Navy ships, crewed by about 350 military and civilians, including botanists and mineralogists, left port to explore the vast Pacific Ocean, north and south.  The U.S. Exploring Expedition, a deliberate step by an emerging nation with an eye on becoming a world power, collected navigational data useful to U.S. seafarers and documented natural characteristics of the great Pacific to help U.S. naval operations and encourage seaborne commerce.   The expedition improved coastal and ocean surveys in waters central to U.S. interests over the next century, brought numerous biological and geological specimens to the U.S. for study, and helped form the U.S. ocean science community.  First requested by Congress in 1828, the Expedition earned endorsement from John Quincy Adams and sailed during the presidencies of Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren. 

During his first administration, President Trump supported a policy of mapping, exploring, and characterizing the ocean.  In his Presidential Memorandum of 19 November 2019 President Trump stated that: “It is the policy of the United States to act boldly to safeguard our future prosperity, health, and national security through ocean mapping, exploration, and characterization.”  The memo eventually led to the establishment of the National Ocean Mapping, Exploring and Characterizing (NOMEC) Strategy of June 2020.  NOMEC draws attention to the fact that vast areas of the world’s oceans remain largely unexplored, under-mapped, and sparsely characterized.  President Trump’s NOMEC directive focuses on America’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), the region extending seaward 200 nautical miles from a nation’s coast and 12-mile territorial sea.  In its EEZ a sovereign state has exclusive rights regarding exploration and use of marine resources.

The priority given to characterizing the EEZ stems from appreciation of the need to freshly demarcate U.S. borders and to protect growing ocean infrastructure upon which American society increasingly depends.  While the EEZ emerged as an administrative boundary enabling countries to manage resources, today the reasons for defending the EEZ go well beyond protecting resource sovereignty.  Americans depend on ocean infrastructure for energy, communications, food, goods of all kinds, and data for weather forecasting.  More than thirty percent of us live in coastal counties, and this coastal population has grown in tandem with the ports and harbors that sustain local communities and bring goods from the rest of the world to America’s shores and take our exports abroad.