The Next Gold Rush:
Mining in the deep sea
by Isabella Grabski
Your next smartphone might be made of materials from an unlikely source: the deep sea. Our current manufacturing practices are depleting terrestrial deposits of important metals like copper, aluminum, and manganese, but the demand for these materials shows no sign of slowing down. They’re not only useful for emails and Instagram – these metals also play a key role in many green technologies, including wind turbines, solar panels, and electric storage batteries. With this rising demand but diminishing supply, companies are starting to look to the deep sea to get what they need.
Deep-sea mining poses great technological challenges, since the materials of interest are typically located anywhere from 800 to 6,500 meters deep. That’s over four miles below the surface! Nevertheless, mining technology has made large advances over the years, and as of 2019, 29 exploration licenses have been issued over a total ocean area five times the size of the United Kingdom. |
The geography of the deep sea is as complex as what we see on the land around us. These underwater features include trenches, plains, volcanoes, geysers, and even the longest mountain chain on Earth. Deep-sea life is similarly as varied, with a quantity of organisms comparable to that of a typical tropical rainforest. Although we are still in the early days of learning about these organisms in the deep sea, most have been found to be concentrated around three types of geographic features: flat areas known as abyssal plains, isolated mountains known as seamounts, and sulfuric geysers known as hydrothermal vents (insert).
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As eager as companies might be to mine these precious metals, the potential effects on the ecosystem could be devastating. Numerous research efforts suggest that any efforts to mine could harm the organisms living there. Because the materials of interest are located on the same geographic features that are hotbeds for life, any form of mining will disrupt active habitats. A number of studies have been done in an attempt to understand exactly what the consequences would be, based on simulated experiments in the ocean. Although these types of investigations are limited in scope compared to the scale of a full industrial mining operation, they all generally suggest that disturbances to the seabed could take decades or more to recover from. For example, scientists found lingering physical evidence of mining even 26 years after nodules were actually removed from an abyssal plain, and the nematode worm population still hasn’t returned to normal.
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