DEEP SEA MINING, THE BIGGEST THREAT TO THE OCEANS, MIGHT START THIS YEAR
Huge, destructive machines meet beautiful and delicate habitat.
A conversation with filmmaker and oceans expert Julia Barnes. For the entire conversation, please click on the YouTube link.
HART HAGAN: Tell us about deep sea mining. What's going on there?
JULIA BARNES: Deep sea mining is the biggest upcoming threat facing the ocean. I had always thought ocean acidification was the big one; it was going to wipe things out the fastest and in a more permanent way.
But right now, deep sea mining scares me more than anything because it could be a change that affects a huge area of the ocean--and incredibly quickly. It could start within a year or two.
WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF DEEP SEA MINING?
There are different forms of deep sea mining. There is mining for cobalt crusts, and mining of hydrothermal vents and things like that. Right now companies are focusing on exploiting an area called the Abyssal Plains region of the ocean. And they're looking at extracting things called polymetallic nodules.
That form of deep sea mining involves huge machines. They've been described as house-sized machines. They would be 40 feet by 20 feet by 16 feet--really massive things that would be lowered to the bottom of the ocean. They would crawl along the ocean extracting as many polymetallic nodules as they can.
The plan would be that these materials would be crushed at depth. Then the crushed material--along with whatever slurry and sediment that is picked up along with it--gets pumped up through riser pipes to a ship on the surface.
That is a process that of course will destroy everything that is in the path of these mining machines and a lot of the creatures in the deep sea who are not mobile. They can't just pick up and get out of the way of the machines. There are corals and sponges who are attached to the polymetallic nodules.
The thing about life in the deep sea is that everything happens very slowly. You have incredibly long-lived species because the temperatures are very low in the deep sea. So everything is slower and you can have coral reefs who are 4,000 years old. You can have deep sea sponges who are up to 11,000 years old. Some of the oldest beings on the planet exist in the deep sea.
When you think about the fact that some of those could just be obliterated by these mining machines, it is pretty horrific to think about. This process would stir up a lot of sediment on the seabed. Also the materials will be pumped up to the ship on the surface and then dumped back into the ocean. It's a process that will affect all levels of the ocean from the surface to the seabed, 4,000 meters down there.
It is predicted that each mining machine would produce 226 million cubic feet of sediment per day. That's equivalent to about 22,000 dump trucks full of sediment polluting the ocean per vessel every single day. And there would be multiple mining operations going on at once. It's not like there’s just one vessel. This would be happening potentially on a bunch of other mining sites in the same general area.
And the sediment plumes that are created by this wastewater discharge are super destructive for any species who breathes in the water, any fish with gills because this fine particulate matter damages their breathing and you could just wipe them out entirely. It's like being suffocated. They can't breathe through it.
The plumes could be carried by ocean currents hundreds of kilometers out from the mining site and dispersed. So it's a really large area that would be impacted by this. The area that is currently taken up by exploration mining permits--which would eventually presumably be turned over into exploitation permits--is as wide as North America.
This is a massive, massive portion of the ocean. The effects would be far-reaching. I don't think we've ever seen an industry that would stir up and disturb an area of the ocean that large that quickly. It is absolutely unprecedented and the industry is rushing ahead with this.
WHEN COULD THEY START?
They have triggered a rule in international law that might make it so that they're allowed to mine starting in June of this year.
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For the entire conversation, with filmmaker and oceans expert Julia Barnes, please click on the YouTube link.
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