{"id":1791,"date":"2021-08-12T07:19:51","date_gmt":"2021-08-12T07:19:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/horizon.peachpuff-wolverine-566518.hostingersite.com\/?p=1791"},"modified":"2021-08-12T07:19:51","modified_gmt":"2021-08-12T07:19:51","slug":"deep-sea-mining-is-it-an-environmental-curse-or-could-it-save-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/horizon\/1791\/deep-sea-mining-is-it-an-environmental-curse-or-could-it-save-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Deep-sea mining: is it an environmental curse or could it save us?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Potato-sized clumps of metal at the bottom of the deepest oceans might aid our fight against climate change, but mining these could also damage a world we know very little about.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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More than 150 years after French author Jules Verne released his\u00a0Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea<\/em>, the classic tale of deep-sea exploration, we know less about the deep sea than about the surface of the moon. Areas the size of massive continents and located thousands of metres below the water surface remain hidden from us. But now it turns out that they might hold a key to tackling climate change.<\/p>\n

Technologies like electric car batteries, wind turbines and solar panels require rare types of resources that can be found in the seabed. Yet at the same time, mining them might represent an environmental curse – and some scientists warn that it might damage deep-sea ecosystems we know little about, and even disrupt oceanic processes.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, companies are racing ahead with deep-sea mining.\u00a0Some 30 companies<\/a>\u00a0currently have permits to explore the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, with giants like defence and aerospace company Lockheed Martin and Belgian dredger DEME creating their own gambits into deep-sea mining.<\/p>\n

Mining<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Dutch maritime technology company Royal IHC is participating in this new rush. It has extensive experience in areas such as dredging and offshore construction, and is now diversifying into deep-sea mining. \u2018Building equipment for deep-sea mining is very logical for us. It’s related to areas in which we have been working for more than a hundred years,\u2019 said Laurens de Jonge, manager of marine mining at Royal IHC.<\/p>\n

In the past few years, they have been developing the technology necessary to mine at great depths. Their current focus is the extraction of small clusters of resources called polymetallic nodules. These are generally between 1 to 15 cm large \u2013 between the size of a golf ball and a large potato. They contain metals and minerals which are crucial to technologies like batteries or wind turbines.<\/p>\n

These little nodules litter the deep-sea floor in certain areas, but getting them up in a profitable way can be somewhat of a challenge. This is something Royal IHC explored in several European projects, the latest of which was called\u00a0Blue Nodules<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u2018It’s not as romantic as the undersea travels you can read about in Jules Verne,\u2019 said de Jonge. \u2018The logistics are the hardest, because we need to scale up these operations so the mining can be done on an industrial scale.\u2019<\/p>\n

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\u2018We’re operating in a black hole of information, and we need to get a lot more science done before we can decide on whether to allow large-scale commercial mining there.\u2019<\/p>\n