The Trump Administration Wants Seafloor
Mining. What Does That Mean?
A recent executive order would accelerate
mining in little-understood undersea ecosystems.
·
Nodules
are of particular value because they contain metals used in the making of
electronics, sophisticated weaponry, electric-vehicle batteries and other
technologies needed for human development. Nodules are also the easiest
seafloor mineral deposit to collect.
·
The
Metals Company, a Canadian deep-sea mining company, in 2022 successfully
recovered roughly 3,000 tons of nodules from the seafloor, collecting data on
the plume and other effects in the process.
· Tiny plankton are a fundamental food source, directly or indirectly, for almost every creature in the ocean, up to and including whales. Part of the challenge in understanding potential effects is that the pace of life is slow on the seafloor. Deep-sea fish can live hundreds of years. Corals can live thousands.
Life
at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean is slow, dark and quiet. Strange creatures glitter
and glow. Oxygen seeps mysteriously from lumpy, metallic rocks. There is little
to disturb these deep-ocean denizens.
“There’s
weird life down here,” said Beth Orcutt, a geomicrobiologist at Bigelow Laboratory
for Ocean Sciences.
Research
in the deep sea is incredibly difficult given the extreme conditions, and rare given
the price tag.
On
Thursday, President Trump signed an executive order that aims to permit, for the
first time, industrial mining of the seabed for minerals. Scientists have expressed
deep reservations that mining could irreversibly harm these deep-sea ecosystems
before their value and workings are fully understood.
What’s down there, anyway?
Seafloor
mining could target three kinds of metal-rich deposits: nodules, crusts and mounds.
But right now, it’s all about the nodules. Nodules are of
particular value because they contain metals used in the making of electronics,
sophisticated weaponry, electric-vehicle batteries and other technologies needed
for human development. Nodules are also the easiest seafloor mineral deposit to
collect.
Estimated Regions of Seabed
Nodules
Economically
viable nodules take millions of years to form, sitting on the seafloor the whole
time. A nodule is born when a resilient bit of matter, such as a shark tooth, winds
up on the ocean floor. Minerals with iron, manganese and other metals slowly accumulate
like a snowball. The largest are the size of a grapefruit.
Life
accumulates on the nodules, too. Microbial organisms, invertebrates, corals and
sponges all live on the nodules, and sea stars, crustaceans, worms and other life-forms
scuttle around them.
About
half of the known life in flat, vast expanses of seafloor called the abyssal plain
live on these nodules, said Lisa Levin, an oceanographer at the Scripps Institution
of Oceanography. But “we don’t know how widespread species are, or whether if you
mine one area, there would be individuals that could recolonize another place,”
she said. “That’s a big unknown.”
How do you mine the sea?
Two
main approaches to nodule mining are being developed. One is basically a claw, scraping
along the seabed and collecting nodules as it goes. Another is essentially an industrial
vacuum for the sea.
In
both, the nodules would be brought up to ships on the surface, miles above the ocean
floor. Leftover water, rock and other debris would be dropped back into the ocean.
Both
dredging and vacuuming would greatly disturb, if not destroy, the seafloor habitat
itself. Removing the nodules also means removing what scientists think is the main
habitat for organisms on the abyssal plain.
Mining
activities would also introduce light and noise pollution not only to the seafloor,
but also to the ocean surface where the ship would be.
Of
central concern are the plumes of sediment that mining would create, both at the
seafloor and at depths around 1,000 meters, which have “some of the clearest ocean
waters,” said Jeffrey Drazen, an oceanographer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Sediment plumes, which could travel vast distances, could throw life off in unpredictable
ways.
Sediment
could choke fish and smother filter-feeders like shrimp and sponges. It could block
what little light gets transmitted in the ocean, preventing lanternfish from finding
mates and anglerfish from luring prey. And laden with discarded metals, there’s
also a chance it could pollute the seafood that people eat.
“How
likely is it that we would contaminate our food supply?” Dr. Drazen said. Before
mining begins, “I really would like an answer to that question. And we don’t have
one now.”
What do mining companies say?
Mining
companies say that they are developing sustainable, environmentally friendly deep-sea
mining approaches through research and engagement with the scientific community.
Their
research has included basic studies of seafloor geology, biology and chemistry,
documenting thousands of species and providing valuable deep-sea photos and video.
Interest in seafloor mining has supported research that might have been challenging
to fund otherwise, Dr. Drazen said.
Preliminary
tests of recovery equipment have provided some insights into foreseeable effects
of their practices like sediment plumes, although modeling
can only go so far in predicting what would happen once mining reached a commercial
scale.
Impossible
Metals, a seafloor mining company based in California, is developing an underwater
robot the size of a shipping container that uses artificial intelligence to hand
pick nodules without larger organisms, an approach it claims minimizes sediment
plumes and biological disturbance. The Metals Company, a
Canadian deep-sea mining company, in 2022 successfully recovered roughly 3,000 tons
of nodules from the seafloor, collecting data on the plume and other effects in
the process.
The
Metals Company in March announced that it would seek a permit for seafloor mining
through NOAA, circumventing the International Seabed Authority, the United Nations-affiliated
organization set up to regulate seafloor mining.
Gerard
Barron, the company’s chief executive, said in an interview on Thursday that the
executive order was “not a shortcut” past environmental reviews and that the company
had “completed more than a decade of environmental research.”
Anna
Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said the United States would abide by two American
laws that govern deep-sea exploration and commercial activities in U.S. waters and
beyond. “Both of these laws require comprehensive environmental impact assessments
and compliance with strong environmental protection standards,” she said.
What are the long-term risks?
Many
scientists remain skeptical that enough is known about
seafloor mining’s environmental effects to move forward. They can only hypothesize
about the long-term consequences.
Disrupting
the bottom of the food chain could have ripple effects throughout the ocean environment.
An extreme example, Dr. Drazen said, would be if sediment diluted the food supply
of plankton. In that case they could starve, unable to scavenge enough organic matter
from a cloud of sea dust.
Part of the challenge in understanding potential
effects is that the pace of life is slow on the seafloor. Deep-sea fish can live
hundreds of years. Corals can live thousands.
“It’s a different time scale of life,” Dr. Levin
said. “That underpins some of the unknowns about responses to disturbances.” It’s
hard for humans to do 500-year-long experiments to understand if or when ecosystems
like these can bounce back or adapt.
And
there are no guarantees of restoring destroyed habitats or mitigating damage on
the seafloor. Unlike mining on land, “we don’t have those strategies for the deep
sea,” Dr. Orcutt said. “There’s not currently scientific evidence that we can restore
the ecosystem after we’ve damaged it.”
Some
scientists question the need for seafloor mining at all, saying that mines on land
could meet growing demand for metals.
Proponents
of deep-sea mining have claimed that its environmental or carbon footprint would
be smaller than traditional mining for those same minerals.
“There
has been no actual recovery of minerals to date,” said Amy Gartman, an ocean researcher
who leads the United States Geological Survey seabed minerals team, referring to
commercial-scale mining. “We’re comparing theoretical versus actual, land-based
mining practices. If and when someone actually breaks ground on one of these projects,
we’ll get a better idea.”