July 17, 2023 — U.S lawmakers want to temporarily ban deep-seabed mining until a full assessment of its environmental impact is completed and a new regulatory regime is established to protect ocean resources.
Last week, U.S. Representative Ed Case (D-Hawaii) introduced two bills – one creating a moratorium on seabed mining in American waters, and one calling for an international moratorium.
July 12, 2023 — A new study has found that deep-sea mining may pose a big threat to tuna species moving into the eastern Pacific Ocean as climate change pushes them into the open ocean.
Dr Diva Amon, a scientific researcher at the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Director and Founder of NGO SpeSeas explains that climate pressures are expected to push bigeye, skipjack and yellowfin tuna from their current range near small, developing Pacific nations into a “climate refuge” in a deep-ocean zone of the eastern Pacific Ocean.
“These tuna are going to be leaving these Pacific Nations and moving into the high seas and progressively eastward,” she says, adding that the highly-mobile tuna might arrive to these new areas only to find it is already inhospitable due to deep-sea mining.
July 12, 2023 — Research published in the science journal Nature Ocean Sustainability has found deep-sea mining is likely to pose a threat to bigeye, skipjack, and yellowfin tuna populations in the Eastern Pacific Ocean.
Climate change is pushing migratory tuna populations into geographies that overlap with areas allocated for deep-sea mining, according to the study, “Climate change to drive increasing overlap between Pacific tuna fisheries and emerging deep-sea mining industry,” published 11 July.
November 3, 2022 — 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.
The issue will be in spotlight this week as dozens of scientists, lawyers and government officials gather in Jamaica to debate deep sea mining as part of a two-week conference organized by the International Seabed Authority, an independent body created by a United Nations treaty.
The organization is the global custodian for deep ocean waters that don’t fall within any country’s jurisdiction. It has issued 31 exploration licenses so far, and many worry the world’s first license to go the next step and mine international waters could soon be approved with no regulations currently in place.
Read the full article at the Associated Press
October 21, 2021 — Much remains unknown about the long-term effects of deep-sea mining in the Pacific and its role in the greater climate crisis. Given that, activists, governments and the private sector support a 10-year moratorium on deep-sea mining.
Yet the Republic of Nauru has made its intentions clear: Within two years, it will start mining the deep sea of the Clarion Clipperton Zone.
The CCZ — between Hawaii and Kiribati, extending eastward towards Mexico — is just one area of interest for mining outfits, covering 4.5 million square kilometers of the Pacific.
The area is filled with seamounts and deep-sea mountains, home to minerals including manganese, cobalt and several other elements integral to batteries that power smartphones and electric vehicles, among other things.
Governments, such as the Cook Islands, along with private mining outfits, are also looking to do exploratory work in their own waters, which has caused concern due to the unknown fallout.
Read the full story at the Honolulu Civil Beat
September 22, 2021 — Few people have ever heard of the tiny country of Nauru. Even fewer ever think about what happens at the bottom of the world’s oceans. But that may soon change. The seafloor is thought to hold trillions of dollar’s worth of metals and this Pacific-island nation is making bold moves to get a jump on the global competition to plumb these depths.
The targets of these companies are potato-sized rocks that scientists call polymetallic nodules. Sitting on the ocean floor, these prized clusters can take more than three million years to form. They are valuable because they are rich in manganese, copper, nickel, cobalt that are claimed to be essential for electrifying transport and decarbonizing the economy amid the green technological revolution that has emerged to counter the climate crisis.
To vacuum up these treasured chunks requires industrial extraction by massive excavators. Typically 30 times the weight of regular bulldozers, these machines are lifted by cranes over the sides of ships, then dropped miles underwater where they drive along the seafloor, suctioning up the rocks, crushing them and sending a slurry of crushed nodules and seabed sediments from 4,000-6,000 meters depth through a series of pipes to the vessel above. After separating out the minerals, the processed waters, sediment and mining ‘fines’ (small particles of the ground up nodule ore) are piped overboard, to depths as yet unclear.
But a growing number of marine biologists, ocean conservationists, government regulators and environmentally-conscious companies are sounding the alarm about a variety of environmental, food security, financial, and biodiversity concerns associated with seabed mining.
Read the full story at the Maritime Executive
April 5, 2021 — A long-running dispute over plans to start mining the ocean floor has suddenly flared up.
For years it was only environmental groups that objected to the idea of digging up metals from the deep sea.
But now BMW, Volvo, Google and Samsung are lending their weight to calls for a moratorium on the proposals.
The move has been criticised by companies behind the deep sea mining plans, who say the practice is more sustainable in the ocean than on land.
The concept, first envisaged in the 1960s, is to extract billions of potato-sized rocks called nodules from the abyssal plains of the oceans several miles deep.
Rich in valuable minerals, these nodules have long been prized as the source of a new kind of gold rush that could supply the global economy for centuries.
Interest in them has intensified because many contain cobalt and other metals needed for the countless batteries that will power the electric vehicles of a zero-carbon economy.
October 15, 2020 — Especially the microbial part of the carbon cycle is affected.
Deep-seabed mining is considered a way to address the increasing need of rare metals. However, the environmental impacts are considered to be substantial but remain largely unknown and clear regulatory standards are lacking. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, together with colleagues from The Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Germany and the UK, now describe that mining-related disturbances have a long-term impact on carbon flow and the microbial loop at the deep seafloor. They present their results in the journal Progress in Oceanography.
The deep sea is far away and hard to envision. If imagined it seems like a cold and hostile place. However, this remote habitat is directly connected to our lives, as it forms an important part of the global carbon cycle. Also, the deep seafloor is, in many places, covered with polymetallic nodules and crusts that arouse economic interest. There is a lack of clear standards to regulate their mining and set binding thresholds for the impact on the organisms living in affected areas.
An international team of scientists around Tanja Stratmann from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, and Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and Daniëlle de Jonge from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, has investigated the food web of the deep seafloor to see how it is affected by disturbances such as those caused by mining activities.
For this, the scientists travelled to the so-called DISCOL area in the tropical East Pacific, about 3000 kilometers off the coast of Peru. Back in 1989, German researchers had simulated mining-related disturbances in this manganese nodule field, 4000 meters under the surface of the ocean, by ploughing a 3.5 km wide area of seabed with a plough-harrow. “Even 26 years after the disturbance, the plough tracks are still there,” Stratmann described the site. Previous studies had shown that microbial abundance and density had undergone lasting changes in this area. “Now we wanted to find out what that meant for carbon cycling and the food web of this deep ocean habitat.”
June 18, 2020 — For humanity to kick its fossil fuel habit, we’re going to need a lot more wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries. Building all of that green energy infrastructure will likely require billions of tons of metals and minerals, raising the question of where we’re going to get them. One surprising possible answer? The bottom of the sea, where key green energy metals, including nickel, cobalt, and rare earth minerals, can be found in abundance.
But as companies inch closer to actually mining the ocean’s depths, a growing chorus of scientists and environmental advocates are pushing back, warning that such activity could cause irreversible harm to ecosystems we’ve barely begun to understand. Last month, the NGO MiningWatch Canada, along with the Ocean Foundation’s Deep Sea Mining Campaign, published a report calling for a moratorium on regulations that would permit companies to begin mining the Pacific seafloor until the risks are better understood and until all alternatives have been “fully explored and applied.” The International Seabed Authority — a U.N. body with a mandate to oversee resource extraction on the ocean floor — is scheduled to issue draft regulations later this year.
Mining regulations on land “are tailored to our understanding of how the ecosystem works,” said MiningWatch Canada’s Catherine Coumans, who served on the editorial team for the report, which summarizes the findings of more than 250 peer-reviewed studies. In the deep ocean, Coumans said, “we’re creating regulations for an ecosystem that we don’t understand.”
April 4, 2019 — No flag can claim the high seas, but many nations exploit them. As a result, life in the two-thirds of the oceans beyond any country’s territorial waters faces many threats that are largely unregulated, including overfishing and the emerging deep-sea mining industry.
Now, nations are negotiating the first-ever high-seas conservation treaty, which the United Nations expects to finalize next year. As delegates met this week at U.N. headquarters in New York City to hash out the details, marine scientists moved to influence the outcome. One research group unveiled the results of a global mapping effort that envisions expansive new marine reserves to protect key high-seas ecosystems. Other teams are working on maps of their own using powerful modeling tools to weigh a reserve’s potential for achieving key conservation goals, such as protecting important feeding grounds or helping sea life adapt to warming seas, against its economic costs.
“The policy opportunity this represents is much rarer than once in a lifetime,” says marine ecologist Douglas McCauley of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Nations are asking “how we should protect two-thirds of the world’s oceans, [and] it’s the first time in human history that this has ever been asked.”