Land-based minerals and metals are necessary for making our electronics, such as phones, television, and computer components. But there is a big problem for the overpopulated world population whose voracious appetite for consumer goods is depleting rare raw materials that build these items.
The United Nations decides whether to authorize the first industrial excavation project in the deep sea. The deep sea biome has escaped the terrestrial and shallow ocean excavation and exploitation of ecological systems critical to the survival of biodiversity, and we are paying a horrible price. We know very little of how the deep depths function, the lifeforms that live there, and the role they play in the climate system. The animals are the cleanup crew disposing of the lifeforms that have passed and sunk to the bottom; what would that mean if they disappeared? Many of us do not want to risk these once pristine (plastics have been found in the deepest ocean trenches) ) and invaluable ecosystems all for a buck.
You could go to a very remote section of the Amazon rainforest that nobody has explored and say, “Why is it important?” There are actually many parallels with the rainforest. One is that the animals in the deep sea can live for a very long time. Some fish can live for hundreds of years. Some of the invertebrates, like corals or sponges, live for thousands of years. Like the rainforest, the deep sea is also extremely vulnerable to physical disturbance. Once the ocean bottom is hit by a trawl [fishing] net, you’ve lost four or five thousand years of life for many corals and sponges. Around 15 percent of our continental margins have already been trawled, leaving vast piles of rubble where deep sea corals once thrived.
Those of us that worry about what geoengineering the sea floor will do to the health of the oceans and the atmosphere understand that it is full of life but is not visible as it is below the rapidly heating surface; climate change acidification, dying coral reefs, the loss of ninety percent of many marine animals such as large fish, and melting glacier ice shelves are all out of sight. The public easily forgets these ecosystems.
The ocean contains a complex combination of physical, chemical, biological, and geological processes that sometimes result in commercially viable forms of a wide range of minerals. This is particularly true in the deep ocean at areas around hydrothermal vents where hot, chemical-rich fluids pouring up from beneath the seafloor produce potentially valuable deposits. A few efforts to mine deposits on the seafloor have succeeded, but to date, not many have overcome the technical challenges involved in retrieving large amounts of material from the deep ocean.
Some successful mining has already occurred in relatively shallow waters less than 200 meters. In the 1960s, Marine Diamond Corp. recovered nearly 1 million carats from the coast of Namibia. Today, de Beers obtains a significant portion of its total diamond production from the continental shelf of southern Africa. Mining operations in deeper waters have led to a very different results: When investors tried about 40 years ago to retrieve potato-sized manganese nodules scattered on the ocean floor, almost half a billion dollars worth of prospecting couldn’t make their efforts profitable.
Since then, the mining industry has been hard at work developing specialized dredgers, pumps, crawlers, drills, platforms, cutters and corers, many of them robotic and all designed to work in the harsh conditions of the deep ocean. In addition, increases in the price of many materials such as copper, plus increasing demand from emerging economies is making such ventures more economically feasible. Recent discoveries of rich deposits on the seafloor and advances in technology are generating renewed interest in seafloor mining, including more diamonds, iron sands, cobalt-rich manganese crusts, phosphorite nodules and even those problematic manganese nodules. The rising importance and increasing scarcity of rare earth elements is also making some take a new look at the possibility of refining these materials from seafloor sources.
Most attractive of all for the mining industry are the potential riches at deep-sea hydrothermal vents. Known for nourishing lush communities of exotic life, the vents also can be treasure troves of high-grade minerals. When the very hot, chemical-rich fluids that spout or seep from the vents meet the cold water of the ocean, dissolved minerals solidify from the fluids and billow into the water or fall onto the seafloor or build up into massive chimney-like structures. These chimneys appear to billow black or white “smoke” depending on the chemical makeup of the fluids. Many sulfide deposits on land likely were formed the same way and were later were raised above sea level during the formation of islands and continents over millions of years. The island of Cyprus, for example, holds 30 massive sulfide deposits, which were a main source of copper for ancient Rome.
The mining industry is razor focused on sulfide deposits on vent fields in the South Pacific. The region has scattered islands that do not have international water protection. If the UN approves the excavation, then habitat destruction is assured. Will they recover? Hard to say definitively, but the floor is exceptionally fragile, and some species likely have lived there since the age of the dinosaurs.
“I think that the major point being made here is that we are considering initiating mining operations in an environment that we don’t fully understand. This would be problematic if we could readily observe and understand associated impacts, so that the costs could be internalised by those making a profit. “But, in this instance, observation is near impossible, and legislative tools are complex and often at odds with each other.”
Precious metals on the ocean floor are especially abundant in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), a 4.5m square kilometre (km2) region of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Mexico.
So far, the ISA has issued 19 polymetallic nodule mining exploration contracts, 17 of which are located in the CCZ – covering around one-quarter of the zone’s total area.
To understand the wide-ranging impacts of deep-sea mining, the researchers look at projected tuna biomass increases in the CCZ region, with a buffer zone of 200km around the area.
They use previously published projections of climate impacts on the distribution and abundance of the three most commercially important Pacific tuna species – bigeye, skipjack and yellowfin.
They examine these changes under two emissions pathways: RCP8.5, a very-high-emissions scenario, and RCP4.5, a moderate-mitigation scenario.
The three tuna species are expected to increase by an average of 21% in the CCZ area under both medium- and high-emissions pathways.
This suggests, the authors say, that tuna will move to this zone “regardless of the climate-change scenario”.
The international body determining whether to proceed with deep-sea mining has been working on regulations since 2014. The Byline Times writes on the International Seabed Authority. Thankfully, the talks have stalled.
As the world was boiling, experiencing the hottest temperatures on record, a group representing most of the world’s governments gathered at the International Seabed Authority’s headquarters in Kingston, Jamaica, to decide upon the future of the ocean in a critical way: can we mine the deepest stretches of the world’s oceans for metals needed for the green energy transition?
International meetings discussing deep sea mining – the extraction of minerals from the bottom of the ocean – had the world watching what could have been seen as the turning point for our oceans. However, discussions at the ISA – the little-known UN body in charge of managing deep sea resources in international waters – ended without (yet) giving the green light to an industry that is eager to mine the last untouched corner of our planet.
Since its establishment in 1994, the ISA has been tasked with preparing for the future of deep-sea mining by issuing contracts for exploration and developing the regulations that will govern how mining is to eventually take place. The regulations have been in development since 2014, but further work was paused during the pandemic.
After five weeks of intense discussions and growing pressure from governments, NGOs, scientists and environmentalists against deep sea mining, at the most recent summit, the ISA concluded that the regulatory framework to start industrial-scale seabed mining is not ready yet. It has now set 2025 as the new deadline for developing mining rules.
But can such a framework to regulate mining operations more than 4,000 meters deep – involving ambitious companies and geopolitically-averse countries in a race to profit from the resources supposed to benefit humankind – be developed at such short notice? The history of similar international treaties tells us that it is practically impossible.
The prospect of mining the ocean floor for transition minerals is being called into question by financial market observers who warn of the growing biodiversity risk in deep-sea mining for investors.
Ratings agency Fitch said in a statement on Monday (7 August) that as biodiversity becomes increasingly relevant across financial markets, high-risk activities such as seabed extraction are likely to fall out of favour with investors.
“This could negatively affect future deep-sea mining development through reduced access to capital, particularly if deep-sea mining is subject to negative screening by environmental, social and governance (ESG)-conscious investors,” said Fitch analyst Jonathon Smith.
The ratings agency noted that other controversial mining practices, such as riverine tailings disposal and mountaintop removal mining, have been common targets for portfolio exclusions.
Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica, Chile, Finland, Germany, Portugal, Switzerland and Vanuatu were among the 21 countries that support a ban, moratorium or precautionary pause on deep sea mining.
China, Norway, Nauru, Mexico and the UK, meanwhile, were in support of fast-tracking licences for deep sea mining.
The U.S. is in jeopardy of being left at the starting gate because it has not ratified the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, a requirement to be a member of the ISA.
Finally, WireD UK reports on the plight of green energy and biodiversity.
There are three types of seabed minerals up for grabs: polymetallic nodules (source of nickel, cobalt, copper and manganese), massive sulphides (copper, lead, zinc, gold and silver), and cobalt-rich manganese crusts (cobalt, but also some vanadium, molybdenum, platinum and tellurium, key to thin-film high efficiency photovoltaic cells). Each occurs in distinctly varied habitats, and each requires different technologies to get it above the ocean surface. And each has a different environmental impact.
To find the source of all these metals, you have to go back all the way to the Big Bang. Some of the elements that we know and crave to power our digital world are the result of nuclear reactions that make stars explode as supernovae; others are probably the debris left behind after neutron stars collide.
The holy grail of deep sea mining is usually potato-sized, black and lumpy: polymetallic nodules that take millions of years to gain just a centimetre in size; some are as small as a pea, but others grow as large as a volleyball. They have mainly been found about four to six kilometres beneath the ocean’s surface. One mineral hotspot is an area south of Hawaii and west of Mexico, known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ).
Still, not all deep sea mining is equal. Targeted methods like the ones Murton is researching with his precision drilling into dead vents might not impact biodiversity as much as trawling across the seafloor kicking up sediment. Large sediment plumes from mining would spread out for kilometres, smothering sponges and corals, says Drennan. The plumes would block respiratory and feeding structures and dilute suspended food particles in the water or on the top layer or sediment that many deep sea animals feed on. “The large-scale removal of polymetallic nodules, or the burial of nodules by sediment plumes would also remove the hard substrate habitat that many animals in this ecosystem require to grow or live on,” she adds.
While a single mining operation is unlikely to cause complete extinction of any species, several mining explorations is a different matter, says University of Hawaii oceanographer Craig Smith – and currently 16 permits to explore the CCZ have been granted. “If they all were mined, the total area impacted could be more than 500,000 square kilometres, or an area equivalent to the the size of France. Because abyssal ecosystems recover so slowly, even if takes centuries for all 16 claims to be mined, no mined area will have fully recovered before the last mining begins.”
