Mining the Ocean Floor: Good Idea?Next year a group of Japanese companies and government agencies will start mining minerals at a site 1,000 miles southwest of Tokyo -- and one mile beneath the ocean's surface. It will be the first large-scale test of whether mineral deposits can be mined commercially from the seafloor.
The project is fairly bold. The seafloor is home to priceless deposits of minerals such as gold, copper and cobalt. And thanks to new technologies, it might soon be exploitable. That's potentially good news for miners and commodity speculators. But it poses some alarming challenges for the marine environment -- and the economies that depend on it.
Exploration isn't disruptive to the environment. But seabed mining will be. For one thing, it requires underwater harvesters that will suck up those valuable rocks -- and any organisms or habitats that get in the way. Some will recover, but others never will: Nodules, which support an abundance of organisms, require millions of years to form. Even worse, the harvesters will kick up huge sediment clouds that could spread over vast areas of the seabed, potentially ravaging corals and sponges.
The deep sea also plays a crucial role in regulating the climate by serving as a giant carbon sink. Anything that churns up the seafloor has the potential to disturb that sink -- with unpredictable consequences. Craig Smith, an oceanographer at the University of Hawaii, recently speculated that seabed mining "will probably have the largest footprint of any single human activity on the planet."
I think I heard this somewhere before. Oh yeah:
seaQuest DSVseaQuest DSV(1993 – 1996): The storyline begins in the year 2018, after mankind has exhausted almost all natural resources, except for the ones on the ocean floor.
So is this going to be the equivalent of tar sands mining? Hugely expensive, environmentally devastating, and with questionable returns?