Deep-sea Mining
Bacteria from the ocean floor can beat superbugs and cancer. But habitats are at risk from the hunger for marine minerals

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The deep sea contains more nickel, cobalt and rare earth metals than all land reserves combined, according to the US Geological Survey. Mining corporations argue that deep-sea exploration could help diversify the supply of metals and point to the fact that demand for resources such as copper, aluminum, cobalt for electric car batteries and other metals to power technology and smartphones, is soaring. They say that deep-sea mining could yield far superior ore to land mining with little, if any, waste. Different methods of extraction exist, but most involve employing some form of converted machinery previously used in terrestrial mining to excavate materials from the sea floor, at depths of up to 6,000 meters, then drawing a seawater slurry, containing rock and other solid particles, from the sea floor to ships on the surface. The slurry is then ‘de-watered ’ and transferred to another vessel for shipping. Extracted seawater is pumped back down and discharged close to the sea floor.

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But environmental and legal groups have urged caution, arguing there are potentially massive and unknown ramifications for the environment and for nearby communities, and that the global regulatory framework is not yet drafted. ‘Despite arising in the last half century, the “new global gold rush” of deep-sea mining shares many features with past resource scrambles -including a general disregard for environmental and social impacts, and the marginalisation of indigenous peoples and their rights,a paper, written by Julie Hunter and Julian Aguon, from Blue Ocean Law,and Pradeep Singh, from the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences, Bremen, argues, ‘flic authors say that knowledge of the deep seabed remains extremely limited.‘The surface of the Moon, Mars and even Venus have all been mapped and studied in much greater detail, leading marine scientists to commonly remark that, with respect to the deep sea, “We don’t yet know what we need to know”.