Hunt for deep sea minerals draws scrutiny amid green push
High demand for metals ranging from copper to cobalt is pushing the mining industry to explore the world’s deepest oceans, a troubling development for scientists who warn that extracting minerals from critical ecosystems that help regulate climate could cause irreparable damage.
“It’s one of the most pristine parts of our planet. There’s a lot that stands to be lost,” said Diva Amon, a marine biologist, National Geographic explorer and a scientific adviser to the Benioff Ocean Initiative at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “We will not have collapsed tailings dams, destruction of cultural sites, clearing of rainforest, child artisanal miners, to name a few recent ones,” UK Seabed Resources said in a statement, referring to some of the impacts from mining on land.
Nauru, a tiny island northeast of Australia, is leading the push to allow for actual mining, arguing that it’s at high risk of climate change and seeks to financially benefit from the mining of metals sought in part for green technology like electric car batteries. Several major companies have pledged not to use metals extracted from the deep sea and nations including New Zealand, Fiji and Samoa have called for a moratorium until more is known about its potential impact, a move cheered by scientists and legal experts.
“We do not understand what lives there, how they live there, the global function that this ecosystem plays, and what we stand to lose by irreversibly impacting it,” she said, adding that life in the deep sea is incredibly slow, with minerals growing one to 10 millimeters every million years. “That means that it is highly vulnerable to disturbance and is extremely slow to recover.”
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