More than half a year ago, the most preposterous topic surfaced at the 2022 UN Ocean Conference, deep-sea mining. Amidst increasing demand for minerals and metals, proponents of deep-sea mining believe this can be a solution to climate change.
Who would have thought? After a few millenniums of ravaging our lands and transforming most of the planet’s land surface, we have decided to exploit the deep seas too. Come to think of it, it’s predictable.
As you can already tell, this is not going to be an unbiased piece. As an environmentalist, I think beginning this journey is an impending catastrophe. Sit back and panic because the facts written throughout this piece are evidence-based and absolutely terrifying.
What is deep sea mining?
Deep-sea mining is the process of sucking off valuable minerals and other materials from the deep ocean floor. These minerals look like potato-sized rocks or nodules that contain cobalt, lithium, and other rare metals mostly used in batteries for our technology.
This destructive process involves heavy machinery (shown above) to extract the materials from the seafloor, as well as the construction of underwater infrastructure to support the mining operations. This includes everything from pipelines to transporting the extracted materials to shore, underwater vehicles, and remotely operated robots to assist with the mining process.
Why the sudden interest?
The concept is not new. It was brought up in the 1960s by the publication of J. L. Mero’s Mineral Resources of the Sea, claiming nearly limitless supplies of cobalt, nickel, and other metals found throughout the planet’s oceans. This is evident since the late 1800s when a dredging ship pulled a chunk of iron ore from the seabed north of Russia.
It is no surprise investors are looking out for the next biggest thing. The private and national interests have also been bubbling with the deep-sea mining industry estimating as much as $1 trillion to the US economy annually, while the value of all the gold deposits alone on the seafloor is estimated to be around $150 trillion.
With so much support from these stakeholders, many of the largest mineral corporations in the world have already launched their underwater mining programs. In 2018, a fleet of specialised ships from De Beers Group extracted 1.4 million carats from the coastal waters of Namibia. Nautilus Minerals, a specialised underwater mineral exploration company is in Papua New Guinea shattering a field of underwater hot springs lined with precious metal. Huge national projects to exploit their offshore deposits are also underway.
Eyes on the prize
While these programs are ongoing, they are still considered small-scale. Mining companies are anticipating access to international waters, which cover more than half of the global seafloor and contain more valuable minerals than all the continents combined.
Why have they not started?
“Mining means destruction and in this case, it means the destruction of an ecosystem about which we know pathetically little” — David Attenborough
Did you know that we explored more about space than our oceans? Is it wise to ravage a vast amount of land before understanding what is really going down there? — The profound ecosystems and potential pharmaceutical purposes.
David Attenborough has also called for a moratorium on all deep-sea mining plans. “Mining means destruction and in this case, it means the destruction of an ecosystem about which we know pathetically little,” he says.
Over 600 leading marine science and policy experts have also spoken out that mining deep-sea nodules would be catastrophic for our already stressed, plastic-ridden, overheated oceans. Denizens of the deep like corals, squids, and polychaete worms would be obliterated by the dredging process. This process would also stir up the muck bottom, sending plumes of sediments laced with toxic metals upwards to poison our marine food chains.
A race against time
The International Seabed Authority (ISA), part of the U.N., is the governing body to regulate exploration for and exploitation of deep seabed minerals found in international waters. It is said that they’ve been deliberating regulations governing commercial mining of the deep sea since 2014 and planned to finish them in 2020, but the pandemic delayed that process.
It would have been nice to think that proponents of deep sea mining are concerned about the implications of the process, but they’re growing impatient. One of them is the island nation of Nauru which triggered a treaty provision known as the “two-year rule” that obliges the ISA to finalise and adopt regulations for deep seabed mining within 24 months — July 2023.
If they do not finalise regulations in time, the ISA may accept applications for exploitation even with the absence of formal guidelines.
Countries like Palau, Fiji, New Zealand, Spain, and Germany have called for a complete ban on deep-sea mining. Other stakeholders including banks and consumer-facing brands have pledged to avoid financing or using metals mined from the ocean in response to growing opposition to ocean mining from consumers.
With 6 months left on the clock, opponents are feeling pessimistic about the likelihood that regulations will be finalised in time.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: iStockPhoto.com
