Wil S. Hylton: Sounding the Alarm on Deep Sea Mining
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Rigorous, objective, independent reporting is needed now more than ever. The 11th Hour Project believes in the integral role of good journalism, as exemplified by a recent grant to The Atlantic to support the research and writing of “History’s Largest Mining Operation is About to Begin,” by Wil S. Hylton.
He writes:
Many people imagine the seabed to be a vast expanse of sand, but it’s a jagged and dynamic landscape with as much variation as any place onshore. Mountains surge from underwater plains, canyons slice miles deep, hot springs billow through fissures in rock, and streams of heavy brine ooze down hillsides, pooling into undersea lakes.
These peaks and valleys are laced with most of the same minerals found on land. Scientists have documented their deposits since at least 1868, when a dredging ship pulled a chunk of iron ore from the seabed north of Russia. Five years later, another ship found similar nuggets at the bottom of the Atlantic, and two years after that, it discovered a field of the same objects in the Pacific. For more than a century, oceanographers continued to identify new minerals on the seafloor—copper, nickel, silver, platinum, gold, and even gemstones—while mining companies searched for a practical way to dig them up.
Today, many of the largest mineral corporations in the world have launched underwater mining programs. On the west coast of Africa, the De Beers Group is using a fleet of specialized ships to drag machinery across the seabed in search of diamonds. In 2018, those ships extracted 1.4 million carats from the coastal waters of Namibia; in 2019, De Beers commissioned a new ship that will scrape the bottom twice as quickly as any other vessel. Another company, Nautilus Minerals, is working in the territorial waters of Papua New Guinea to shatter a field of underwater hot springs lined with precious metals, while Japan and South Korea have embarked on national projects to exploit their own offshore deposits. But the biggest prize for mining companies will be access to international waters, which cover more than half of the global seafloor and contain more valuable minerals than all the continents combined.
Deep sea mining is a practice that has little public awareness and that has been positioned to be a “big solve” for acquiring increasingly scarce, valuable minerals to feed exponential demand for electric vehicle batteries and energy storage technologies.
Exploitation permits may be issued in the next 1 to 2 years, prematurely considering that we don’t yet know the impact of these activities on the ocean as an ecosystem and as the “common heritage of mankind.” While tempting to cast deep sea mining as a better approach to mineral extraction than land based mining, our understanding of the trade-offs are far from clear.
