Cite as: 521 U. S. 1 (1997)
Opinion of the Court
cause such lands were already exempt from sale, entry, or occupation).
Alaska misreads the application. Although the application did seek to preclude appropriation of lands within the proposed Range under the public land laws (presumably where those laws would otherwise apply), the application had a far broader purpose: to establish a reservation for the use of the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife. See Alaska Exh. 81, p. 1 ("The purpose of this withdrawal is to establish an Arctic Wildlife Range within all or such portion of the described lands as may be finally determined to be necessary for the preservation of the wildlife and wilderness resources of that region of northeastern Alaska"). Because the application was not designed solely to prevent appropriation of lands governed by the public land laws, focusing on whether the public land laws reach submerged lands cannot end our inquiry into whether the application embraced submerged lands.
Second, Alaska argues that no "international duty or public exigency" supported the inclusion of submerged lands within the application. As we concluded earlier, however, the United States need only identify an "appropriate public purpose" for conveying or reserving submerged lands. See supra, at 40. Creation of a wildlife refuge is an appropriate public purpose that is served by including submerged lands within the refuge. Alaska also appears to suggest that an application alone can never reveal an appropriate public purpose, because until the application is granted it cannot be known whether submerged lands are necessary to achieve that purpose. See Reply Brief for State of Alaska 14. If the Secretary of the Interior had granted the withdrawal application before Alaska's statehood—thereby confirming that an appropriate public purpose supported the reservation of submerged lands—Alaska presumably would have no claim that the application had never covered submerged lands in the first place. It follows that Alaska objects not to
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