Maybe the greatest alarm in recent years has followed the discovery of plastic floating in the ocean. Scientists estimate that 17 billion pounds of polymer are flushed into the ocean each year, and substantially more of it collects on the bottom than on the surface. Just as a bottle that falls from a picnic table will roll downhill to a gulch, trash on the seafloor gradually makes its way toward deepwater plains and hadal trenches. After his expedition to the trenches, Victor Vescovo returned with the news that garbage had beaten him there.
He found a plastic bag at the bottom of one trench, a beverage can in another, and when he reached the deepest point in the Mariana, he watched an object with a large S on the side float past his window. Trash of all sorts is collecting in the hadal—Spam tins, Budweiser cans, rubber gloves, even a mannequin head.
Scientists are just beginning to understand the impact of trash on aquatic life. When a young whale drifted ashore and died in the Philippines in , an autopsy revealed that its belly was packed with 88 pounds of plastic bags, nylon rope, and netting.
Two weeks later, another whale beached in Sardinia , its stomach crammed with 48 pounds of plastic dishes and tubing. Certain types of coral like to eat plastic more than food.
They will gorge themselves like a kid on Twinkies instead of eating what they need to survive. Microbes that flourish on plastic have ballooned in number, replacing other species as their population explodes in a polymer ocean.
Read: A troubling discovery in the deepest ocean trenches. If it seems trivial to worry about the population statistics of bacteria in the ocean, you may be interested to know that ocean microbes are essential to human and planetary health. About a third of the carbon dioxide generated on land is absorbed by underwater organisms , including one species that was just discovered in the CCZ in The researchers who found that bacterium have no idea how it removes carbon from the environment, but their findings show that it may account for up to 10 percent of the volume that is sequestered by oceans every year.
Many of the things we do know about ocean microbes, we know thanks to Craig Venter, the genetic scientist most famous for starting a small company in the s to compete with the Human Genome Project.
The two-year race between his company and the international collaboration generated endless headlines and culminated in a joint announcement at the White House to declare a tie. He wanted to learn the language of genetics in order to create synthetic microbes with practical features. After his work on the human genome, he spent two years sailing around the world, lowering bottles into the ocean to collect bacteria and viruses from the water. By the time he returned, he had discovered hundreds of thousands of new species, and his lab in Maryland proceeded to sequence their DNA—identifying more than 60 million unique genes, which is about 2, times the number in humans.
Then he and his team began to scour those genes for properties they could use to make custom bugs. Venter now lives in a hypermodern house on a bluff in Southern California. Chatting one evening on the sofa beside the door to his walk-in humidor and wine cellar, he described how saltwater microbes could help solve the most urgent problems of modern life.
One of the bacteria he pulled from the ocean consumes carbon and excretes methane. Venter would like to integrate its genes into organisms designed to live in smokestacks and recycle emissions. Venter was also studying bacteria that could be useful in medicine. Microbes produce a variety of antibiotic compounds, which they deploy as weapons against their rivals. Many of those compounds can also be used to kill the pathogens that infect humans. Nearly all of the antibiotic drugs on the market were initially derived from microorganisms, but they are losing efficacy as pathogens evolve to resist them.
What we need is an arsenal of new compounds. Venter pointed out that ocean microbes produce radically different compounds from those on land. We may find drugs that could be used to treat gout, or rheumatoid arthritis, or all kinds of other conditions. Marine biologists have never conducted a comprehensive survey of microbes in the hadal trenches. The conventional tools of water sampling cannot function at extreme depth, and engineers are just beginning to develop tools that can.
Microbial studies of the deepwater plains are slightly further along—and scientists have recently discovered that the CCZ is unusually flush with life. Most of those microbes, he said, live on the very same nodules that miners are planning to extract. Drazen is an academic ecologist; Venter is not. Venter has been accused of trying to privatize the human genome, and many of his critics believe his effort to create new organisms is akin to playing God.
Mining executives insist that their work in the ocean is misunderstood. Some adopt a swaggering bravado and portray the industry as a romantic frontier adventure. Nautilus occupies a curious place in the mining industry. It is one of the oldest companies at work on the seafloor, but also the most precarious. Although it has a permit from the government of Papua New Guinea to extract metal from offshore vents, many people on the nearby island of New Ireland oppose the project, which will destroy part of their marine habitat.
Local and international activists have whipped up negative publicity, driving investors away and sending the company into financial ruin. It is now less than a penny per share. Parianos acknowledged that Nautilus was in crisis, but he dismissed the criticism as naive. Seabed minerals are no different from any other natural resource, he said, and the use of natural resources is fundamental to human progress. And mining is what made our lives better than what they had before the Stone Age.
DeepGreen is both a product of Nautilus Minerals and a reaction to it. The company was founded in by David Heydon, who had founded Nautilus a decade earlier, and its leadership is full of former Nautilus executives and investors. As a group, they have sought to position DeepGreen as a company whose primary interest in mining the ocean is saving the planet. They have produced a series of lavish brochures to explain the need for a new source of battery metals, and Gerard Barron, the CEO, speaks with animated fervor about the virtues of nodule extraction.
His case for seabed mining is straightforward. Barron believes that the world will not survive if we continue burning fossil fuels, and the transition to other forms of power will require a massive increase in battery production.
He points to electric cars: the batteries for a single vehicle require pounds of copper, pounds of nickel, and 15 pounds each of manganese and cobalt. On a planet with 1 billion cars, the conversion to electric vehicles would require several times more metal than all existing land-based supplies—and harvesting that metal from existing sources already takes a human toll.
Terrestrial mines for nickel and copper have their own litany of environmental harms. They worry that this new gold rush will do untold damage to the ocean's food web and other complex natural systems. What mountaintop-removal coal mining has done in Appalachia, deep-sea mining has the potential to do in the Pacific Ocean — affecting the ecosystem and biodiversity in ways scientists say they don't yet fully understand.
Mining interests plan to use large, robotic machines to excavate the ocean floor in a way that's similar to strip-mining on land. The materials are pumped up to the ship, while wastewater and debris are dumped into the ocean, forming large sediment clouds underwater. The slurry is then loaded onto barges and shipped to onshore processing facilities. The problem is that deep-sea mining operations will inevitably harm sensitive underwater ecosystems.
Marine life threatened by the projects we're challenging include endangered sea turtles loggerhead , green, leatherback , hawksbill, olive ridley and flatback , sharks grey reef, tiger, great hammerhead, and whitetip reef , tuna frigate, mackerel, dog-tooth, yellowfin, albacore and bigeye , cetaceans pygmy killer whale, sperm whale, spinner dolphin and Cuvier's beaked whale and marine birds Beck's petrel and Heinroth's shearwater.
Mining operations strategies will need to prioritise the avoidance of environmental impacts. This needs to include establishing protected area networks to keep large parts of the seabed undisturbed as well as stringent and precautionary controls on the permissible extent and duration of mining operations. Minimising impacts should involve, among other things, improving mining equipment to reduce seafloor disturbance. Remedying environmental impacts has not yet been shown to be effective in practice.
Enhanced regulation The ISA is operating with the dual mandate of promoting the development of deep-sea minerals whilst ensuring that this development is not harmful to the environment.
This challenging and conflicting mandate will require improved oversight by the international community — including government representatives and the general public — to ensure that marine life is adequately protected. To avoid possible conflicts of interest due to the dual mandate of ISA, the organisation should consider divesting itself of some of its responsibilities, and placing them on independent entities. Circular economy The repair, recycling and reuse of products should be encouraged to help reduce the demand for raw materials from the deep sea.
Enhancing product design to make use of less or alternative materials can also reduce the demand. Cuyvers, L. Deep seabed mining: a rising environmental challenge. They rarely appeared on corporate or national balance sheets. Miners extracted oil, gas, coal, iron, gold, copper, lithium and other minerals, while leaving other species, remote communities and future generations to pay the price.
Mining has often proved a trade based on imported resources and exported risk. In recent decades, this trade-off has come into question as scientific knowledge of the consequences has advanced.
Environmental concerns have prompted calls for stricter regulation. But, oversight, if it exists at all, is often shaped by those who stand to benefit in the short term rather than those left to clean up the mess. And mines are moving further from power centres, which means less likelihood of Nimby protests, media coverage, challenges by conservationists or legal redress. If mining in the deep ocean is technologically challenging and expensive, then independent oversight is even tougher: beyond all national jurisdictions, too expensive for environmental organisations to reach, too inaccessible for all but invited journalists to visit, and totally free of people so no chance of hold-ups by protesters.
Fish, crustaceans and microbes might suffer, but they cannot complain. Just like almost every other mining project in history, TMC and other mining companies promise to maintain the highest environmental standards, and to operate within guidelines laid out by regulatory bodies.
And just like almost every other mining project in history, it is in their interest to exert pressure on those same regulatory bodies to ensure projects go ahead quickly with environmental standards that do not sink their bottom line. Payal Sampat, mining programme director at the Earthworks environmental charity, said the rushed approach to deep-sea mining was reminiscent of the wild-west prospectors of the 19th century. Our global heritage is being decided in small backroom discussions.
Most people are completely unaware that this enormous planet-changing decision is being made. It is very non-transparent. It is all about looking at the next frontier rather than using the resources we already have much better. Nauru ought to provide a salutary reminder of the destructive spiral that follows when an ecosystem is sucked dry.
They wanted the deposits to fertilise gardens and farmland in their own countries, and promised to restore the landscape and fully compensate those affected by environmental damage.
But within two decades, the resource was virtually exhausted, leaving an inland moonscape of gnarled, spiky rock and an economy in tatters. Restitution funds were supposed to rehabilitate hectares 1, acres , but they have been frittered away in the past 25 years with barely six hectares recovered.
The gutting of the topsoil has caused unforeseen problems to the local climate, vegetation and society. Loss of vegetation has prevented rain clouds from forming over the island and led to more droughts. Several endemic plant species are now endangered and food production has been affected. Locals have turned from healthy local produce, such as coconuts, to fatty and salty tinned goods, resulting in one of the highest levels of obesity, heart disease and diabetes in the world. Now, thanks to human avarice … and short-sightedness, our island is mostly a wasteland.
The 12, inhabitants have resisted repeated attempts to relocate them to an island off Queensland and looked for new ways to make a living. After the economy collapsed, the desperate government turned to offshore banking.
But with customers that included the Russian mafia and al-Qaida, the US Treasury blacklisted the island as a centre of money laundering and corruption. After that failure, the microstate rented itself out to Australia as a detention centre for asylum seekers , a business that now provides more than half of the state revenue. When that declined, Nauru began to eye up the surrounding seabed by teaming up with TMC, which is paying tens of millions of dollars a year in royalties for its fully owned NORI subsidiary.
In reality, the island acts more like a client state for the corporation, and a company executive can behave as its spokesperson. Little wonder then that eyebrows were raised when this tiny nation, which constitutes just 0.
Few observers doubt that this was done at the behest of TMC. In lieu of comment, The Metals Company referred questions to three external experts that it said specialised in deep-sea ecosystems and plume dynamics. TMC is among a cluster of mining companies that argue seabed minerals are essential if the world is to make the transition from fossil fuels to renewables.
Barron says tapping seabed resources would still not close the supply gap, but that it could accelerate the transition, reduce mining emissions and provide revenue for poorer countries.
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