The Navy's permit for an under-ice robot navigation grid

How the public reaches this

The record on this one is shut. NMFS took comment for 30 days after publishing the proposed authorization on July 22nd, 2026 and received three comment letters, all from private citizens, then issued the authorization on September 10th, 2026. There is no open filing path now. The next door is the Year 10 renewal, which the Year 9 proposal already invited comment on inside its own action line, and no renewal notice has published. Anyone who wants standing in Year 10 should watch the Federal Register for a proposed authorization under docket RTID 0648-XF889 or its successor.

Timeline

Sources

Every document a fact on this page was checked against.

1. Federal Register via GPO govinfo, NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service

   2026-09-10

2. Federal Register plain text, NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service

   2026-09-10

3. Federal Register plain text, NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service

   2026-07-22

4. Federal Register via GPO govinfo, NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service

   2026-07-22

How this decision moved

One dated line per material change, oldest first.

1. 2026-09-12 Added from today's verified claims. NMFS issued the Office of Naval Research an incidental harassment authorization for Year 9 of its Arctic Research Activities, published September 10th, 2026 at 91 FR 57547, effective September 14th, 2026 through September 13th, 2027. Signed September 4th by Kimberly Damon-Randall, Director of the NMFS Office of Protected Resources, filed September 9th. The authorization covers Level B harassment of beluga whale and Arctic ringed seal, and states that take by Level A harassment is neither anticipated nor authorized. Two figures in the record are worth tracking as this series continues. The stock table gives the Beaufort Sea beluga abundance as 39,258 from a 1992 survey, and gives the Arctic ringed seal stock abundance as undetermined, with its potential biological removal also undetermined, for the one species here listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. The finding relies on a Biological Opinion the NMFS Alaska Regional Office issued on September 13th, 2022. No authorized take figure is recorded here, because the take table could not be read from the Federal Register text or XML on any route tried and an abundance estimate is not a take.

2. 2026-09-12 Location dropped the same day it was added, and the record says so rather than quietly losing a field. The item shipped with an exact point, 72.0 north and 150.0 west, standing in for a study area of about 639,237 square kilometres across the Beaufort and eastern Chukchi seas, the high seas and part of Canada's exclusive economic zone. No claim in the run's verified set establishes those coordinates, and the site publishes a location as schema.org GeoCoordinates and as a pin on the docket map, so a representative point was being published as a measured fact. The area itself is in this item's summary and in the deck, where it belongs. The validator's own remedy text is the one taken here, that an item keeps its page and its row without claiming a spot on the map.

Articles on this decision

Each of these verified a claim against a document this decision also rests on.

Cite this

Alaska AI Docket, The Navy's permit for an under-ice robot navigation grid. Tracked since September 12, 2026, last verified September 12, 2026. https://alaskaaihq.com/docket/onr-arctic-iha-year-9/ · Reuse permitted under CC BY 4.0 with attribution. This decision is also available as structured data in the docket JSON, item id onr-arctic-iha-year-9.

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