Drill, baby, drill?
HUCK looks at ocean mining. There be some valuable minerals on that there sea bed, and some people desperately want to get hold of them!
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In the 1960s, oil and gas companies made a giant leap from drilling on land to drilling offshore and, despite BP’s recent ecological catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, mining companies are about to follow suit with the first deep sea mining expeditions ready to launch.
This idea of mining the sea floor was first proposed in the 1960s, but it wasn’t until recent years that it became financially viable as the demand for copper, gold, zinc and silver (particularly for use in electronics such as iPhones) sent the prices for these commodities soaring. The sea floor is particularly appealing to mining companies because minerals are found at much higher concentrations in the deep than on land. To be specific, these minerals are found in sulphur deposits around hydrothermal vents, which are those mini volcano-like structures that regularly feature nature programmes because they harbour all sorts of interesting life forms. Nautilus Minerals Inc. based in Houston, Texas claim to be “the first company to commercially explore the sea floor for [these] massive sulphide systems.”
In order to extract these minerals that Nautilus will use similar technologies used for offshore oil and gas drilling. There are also two specialised deep sea mining units being built for Nautilus by Soil Machine Dynamics Ltd in the UK as part of a £33 million contract. These machines are designed to work at depths of around 1,500 metres and according to Nautilus, they will “cut ore from the seafloor and pump it to the surface as seawater slurry. Once the ore is dewatered, it will be shipped to shore for processing.” Drilling is set to start at the Solwara 1 Project in the territorial waters of Papua New Guinea later this year but the company is also looking at sites in Tonga, Fiji and New Zealand.
But what could be the problem of this? Well, we know very little about the ocean floor and marine biologists, environmental scientists and campaign groups such as WWF are worried that deep sea mining may destroy these fragile ecosystems around hydrothermal vents. In a recent article in The Guardian, Catherine Coumans, a coordinator at Mining Watch Canada said that “There are concerns about disturbance of the sea bottom. Very little is known about it. This is a new frontier that has yet to be explored with a fragile, marine ecosystem. There's no significant independent work that has been done on the impact of mining. I would challenge the company to provide an independent scientific study."
So while scientists can’t say for certain that deep sea mining will be irreversibly destructive for sure, surely it’s best to err on the side of caution as carving up these vents can’t be good for the health of the ecosystems that rely on them and the wider ocean in general? On top ocean acidification, overfishing and plastic pollution, isn’t mining just another example of kicking the ocean while it's down?
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Drill, baby, drill? (text) by Ruth Carruthers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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