Mining the seven seas
Deep-sea mining as the next frontier in the technological race to the bottom
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Vast ocean floors are quickly becoming the next frontier in geopolitical rivalries. This wild west beyond national jurisdiction presents untold material riches, from critical minerals to hydrocarbons. Elements like copper, zinc, cobalt, lithium, nickel, manganese, silver, and gold are all needed for the proper functioning of our modern world and they can all be found at the bottom of the seas.
Extracting minerals from the oceans is dubbed seabed mining and it can potentially cause severe environmental issues as the practice disturbs the aquatic ecosystem. I say potentially because we just don’t know enough about deep-sea flora and fauna to make informed decisions. As Cindy van Dover said in 2013: ‘‘We don't yet know what we need to know.‘‘
So what exactly is seabed mining?
Seabed mining1 refers to the recovery of minerals through underwater mining of seabeds. A seabed is the floor of the sea. The ocean is deepest in the Mariana Trench, where the seabed is found at a depth of 10909 meters (i.e. deeper than the height of Mount Everest). You can imagine the difficulty of such an enterprise, which is usually done by deploying remotely operated robots that plow the seabed. Then, the collected material is sent to a surface platform or ship where initial processing is done, before sending the materials to some onshore facility for further processing.
