The amazing technical achievements of deep sea mining... and its massive environmental cost

I'm fine with clickbaity headlines when the article turns out to be more interesting than suggested.

The real target of the crew on board this giant ship was a lost Soviet submarine. Six years earlier, the K-129 had sunk 1,500 miles north-west of Hawaii while carrying ballistic nuclear missiles. The Russians failed to find their sub despite a massive search, but an American network of underwater listening posts had detected the noise of an explosion that eventually led US teams to the wreck.

So the CIA hatched an audacious plan, Project Azorian, to retrieve the submarine. That would have been hard enough. But there was another challenge as well - it had to be done without the Russians knowing. The spies needed to create a smokescreen so they pretended to be exploring the possibility of deep sea mining. A PR campaign conveyed a determined effort to find manganese nodules. These potato-sized rocks lie scattered in the abyss, the great plains of the deep ocean.

Amazingly, the giant steel claws successfully seized the sub. But then disaster struck. At some point on the way up, the immense strain became too much, part of a claw snapped off and most of the sub slipped back to the seabed... This might have derailed the very notion of deep sea mining for good. But in fact it proved that with clever engineering and a lavish budget it was possible – just - to operate in the otherworldly depths. “It’s really difficult but we showed it could be done,” says Sharp.

...

Run by a Canadian firm, Nautilus Minerals, the project will be managed from a ship in the tropical waters of the Bismarck Sea off Papua New Guinea. Three of the vast machines will be lowered to the slopes of an undersea volcano. There they will encounter a stretch of seabed covered in hydrothermal vents. These strange twisting chimneys are formed by boiling water blasting up from the rock.

As with most fields of vents, this one is astonishingly rich in valuable metals. The site is named Solwara 1 - “salt water” in the local language.But the hydrothermal vents host thriving communities of marine life - snails, worms and shrimp that have evolved to cope with very specific conditions. In some cases these creatures are extremely rare, which is why the prospect of deep sea mining is highly controversial. The plan is for Kewa to guide the steel teeth of the mining machines so they methodically demolish the vents, pulverising them into fragments.

The UN’s International Seabed Authority has drawn up maps dividing the ocean into blocks. There are 29 exploration areas, licensed for mineral prospecting for 15 years. In total they stretch over an astonishing 500,000 square miles (1.3m sq km) of seabed in the Pacific, the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. Ventures from 19 different countries have paid for the rights to investigate them. China has four of them. Russia and South Korea each have three. France and Germany have two. And so does the UK, via a company called UK Seabed Resources. The company’s owner, Lockheed Martin, has an interesting connection. It was one of the contractors secretly hired by the CIA to retrieve the Soviet submarine – and it has remained genuinely interested in manganese nodules ever since.

...

No deep sea mine can start operating until the ecology of each zone has been assessed. And the rush to mine has generated something unexpected - a wealth of new information about life in some of the least explored parts of the world. Among those are thousands of new species ranging from sponges to crustaceans.

Pedro Martinez, who works at the Senckenberg Research Institute in Germany, told a conference at London’s Natural History Museum how hundreds of creatures spotted in the depths are completely new to science. “We don’t even have names for these species...there are no books to identify them. The abyssal plains,” he asserted, “may have the highest biodiversity in the oceans, maybe the highest biodiversity on the planet.”

So what impact will mining have on marine life? Huge excavators will rumble over the seabed. Either they will tear up hydrothermal vents or they will vacuum up nodules. It will be highly destructive. Michael Lodge admits that but also argues that the areas affected will be tiny compared with the vastness of the oceans – “much less than half a per cent” – and that big areas have been earmarked as reserves to be left untouched.

The geologist Bram Murton has warned of “an ill-informed knee-jerk reaction” to ocean mining which, he says, offers the potential to support a low-carbon future.But Glover says that ultimately it’s about whether it’s right for humans to go into an area and destroy species we know nothing about.

All this raises an awkward set of questions. Where should we get our minerals from? Should phones and wind turbines and electric cars carry a label explaining the origins of their raw materials? Time is running out to come up with answers. More than 40 years since the CIA faked a deep sea mining operation, the first genuine ones may start work far sooner than most people realise.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/deep_sea_mining#sa-link_location=container-top-stories-3&intlink_from_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fnews&intlink_ts=1519056661276&story_slot=1-sa