Seafloor Mining Will Make Rich Countries Richer

Greetings, all! Thank you as always for continuing to read along, even when I ramble on about moon mining. I thought this would be a great opportunity to dive deeper into the more likely scenario we are facing, one of seafloor mining. So, let’s dive!

            I had never heard of the International Seabed Authority prior to this year. It is an intergovernmental organization, established in 1994, intended to oversee the equitable division of natural resources in international waters. On the surface it’s a worthwhile mission statement that blends environmental responsibility and social justice. But in practice, it appears as though environmental safeguards will be ignored while rich, exploitative countries continue to oppress, marginalize, and disadvantage poor, exploited countries. We’ll get to that shortly.

            First, a quick rundown of the science. There are four known major manganese nodule deposits in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, totaling more than 14.5 million square kilometers (roughly 1.5 times the surface area of Europe) (https://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-3/mineral-resources/manganese-nodules/). These nodules range in size from a baseball to a soccer ball and contain manganese, iron, nickel, titanium, copper, and cobalt.

Manganese nodules can form through chemical precipitation and diagenetic growth. Similar to cloud formation where water vapor condenses upon a nucleus (a bit of dust, dirt, smoke, or salt), metals can precipitate out of sea water and condense around a nucleus (such as a bit of shell, tooth, or bone), growing into a metal-rich nodule. Limestone is another example of chemical precipitation, but calcium carbonate, rather than metal, is the resulting precipitate. In contrast, diagenetic growth occurs when metals dissolved in the pore spaces between sediment clasts condense around a nucleus on the ocean floor, rather than precipitating out of the water column.

There are billions of tonnes of ore contained in these deposits. The fact that these nodules lie in international waters complicates mining and production. Power has always been distributed unevenly geographically and throughout time. As we shift away from oil—a source of economic, political, and energetic power that has historically been sought by the U.S., Europe, and other countries wealthy enough to wage war for the fossil fuel—we will now see that future power lies in metals. If the world is going to run on electricity, the countries that mine the most metal and produce the most batteries will continuing dominating the global arena.

Enter the International Seabed Authority. As it turns out, the Metals Company, a private organization out of Australia, has already been granted permission to begin exploratory mining and data collection, without clearly building a pathway for smaller, poorer island countries to economically benefit from the extraction (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-09-15/deepsea-mining-pacific-ocean-nauru-metals/101438478). It is possible that Nauru, Kiribati, the Cook Islands, and other interested developing nations may come to benefit from a partnership with the Metals Company, but it seems likely that yet again, colonialism will win. The remnants of the British Empire will probably continue to disproportionally rake in the dough as they rake the ocean floor free of nodules and sea life simultaneously.

And we will gladly give them our dollars. Or mine the ocean ourselves! Americans will always choose cars over marine life. I am 100% in support of the electric buses and electric chargers in Weaverville, and I applaud the Office of Education, Chamber of Commerce, and all partners who made it possible. But everything comes at a cost.

In this county, it takes more than a year to get a CEQA license for a 10,000 square foot cannabis garden. The quantity of environmental analyses required to get a truly accurate picture of potential impacts to the ocean and the creatures therein would take upwards of five years, minimum. Seafloor dwelling organisms like worms, clams, and sea cucumbers will get killed in the direct area of extraction. Sediment clouds could bury benthic organisms further away, or worse yet, shade out plankton closer to the surface. Once the base of the food chain is gone, the ocean will die.

But of course, everyone who understands the climate crisis knows the ocean is getting hotter and more acidic. Moon mining or seafloor nodule extraction, all for the luxury of private vehicles.

What a wild ride.

Mine the Moon to Save the Seafloor!

            Welcome back, readers! What a relief it is writing during these cloudy, rainy days. There is magic in the sound of raindrops on rooftops, in the scent of parched earth now quenched. It’s enough to soothe a troubled mind and soften a strained soul.

            I came across an interesting proposition in an article that I wanted to share with you all: to save the deep ocean, we should mine the moon (https://nautil.us/to-save-the-deep-ocean-we-should-mine-the-moon-238541/).

            I know I sound crazy. Moon bats, am I right? “We can’t mine the moon! What a logistical nightmare!” Space is scary. It’s dangerous. It is only just now beginning to be ‘managed’ under complex international law that is still being written. Why mess with space?

            Well, it all comes down to rare earth elements, minerals, and metals necessary for the widespread decarbonization and electrification of our economy. As some readers have noted, cobalt miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo are widely exploited, subjected to human rights abuses like lack of food and water. And worse. Our hunger for personal vehicles, first gas-powered, now electric, continues to ravage poorer countries in the southern hemisphere. To some, the answer to these humanitarian violations is to mine a massive swath of Pacific Ocean seafloor between Hawaii and Mexico for minerals and metals (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02242-y). No one lives at the bottom of the ocean, right?

            Well, certainly no humans live at the bottom of the ocean. And certainly, to decarbonize we will need copious amounts of copper, cobalt, manganese, and nickel ore. But mining the ocean floor presents nearly as many logistical problems as moon mining does, and at the detriment of a delicate ecosystem that contains a myriad of sea creatures. These animals possess value simply by existing, but if one were to take an anthropocentric approach also may possess medicinal and therapeutic properties that could be beneficial to humans. The long-term and widespread impacts of mining roughly two miles beneath the ocean’s surface are not well-understood. Indeed, we haven’t even classified everything that lives down there. Just as drilling for oil in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge would result in catastrophic loss of irreplaceable, charismatic Arctic megafauna, drilling the seafloor for metals and minerals will result in catastrophic loss of ocean life, both known and as-yet undiscovered.

            Here’s where we circle back around to the moon. The moon is the result of a cataclysmic collision between proto-Earth and a Mars-sized planet called Theia. This caused the two molten planetoids to merge while ejecting a spinning mass of material that would then become our moon (https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/how-did-the-moon-form.html). Although the moon lacks an atmosphere and is geologically dead, devoid of weather, meteoric impact protection, plate tectonics, and volcanoes, it consists of materials we can find on Earth, like iron, titanium, aluminum, and magnesium. The lunar surface consists primarily of anorthosite and basalt, two common, well-studied igneous rocks. It follows that other concentrations of ore may be present in the formerly molten remains of the moon.

            Both seafloor and lunar mining require the use of robotics and communications. It’s not feasible for humans to undertake such environmentally dangerous labor, and it would be better performed by rovers and automated machinery. We already possess the hardware. Even the “software” of artificial intelligence is making strides toward being capable of conducting an autonomous mining operation or similar project. I think colonizing Mars is a waste of time and resources, but mining the lifeless moon, our closest neighbor, might be worth it.

If we can spare the ocean floor, we must. It is critical. We must protect the final bastion of unspoiled habitat. It will be comparably difficult to mine the moon as opposed to the seafloor, and it will be much simpler to mine the moon as compared to an asteroid or meteorite. The moon has a solid, predictable orbit that stabilizes our axial wobble and we’ve already demonstrated that we can put people on the surface and bring them back home safely.

In all honesty, we probably won’t invest in lunar mining just like we won’t invest in the genetics needed to bring back the caribou and wolves when they’ve gone extinct. RIP, Pacific Ocean.