THE NEW GOLD RUSH : NOW GOLD PURVEYORS ARE TARGETING THE SEA IN THEIR SEARCH FOR GOLD

THE NEW GOLD RUSH : NOW GOLD PURVEYORS ARE TARGETING THE SEA IN THEIR SEARCH FOR GOLD

It seems no one is safe from mining, not even deep sea creatures, who until now enjoyed the relative privacy of the sea floor.

Indeed miners have discovered the new world: buried a mile under the sea waves is an 'ocean' of gold, copper, zinc and other treasures.

Scientists have reckoned long ago that the sea contained untapped resources, but the gluttony of an every increasing population has increased demand of such commodities to a level unseen before, prompting some to turn a roving eye to the pristine depths of our oceans.

Indeed mining companies have already lined up their permits and their machinery to start mining in the next one to five years.

How would the mining companies find the minerals? That's actually the easy part.  Most minerals are lying in deep veins that have poured out of hydrothermal and volcanic vents for millennia.  The minerals are even easier to find than on land: when they pour out of the vents at 600 degrees Fahrenheit, and hit the cold water around it, it is naturally decanted to the sea floor.  This makes for 'easy pickins'.  The veins do not have to be isolated from earthen deposits in which they are trapped, making the yields ten times more bountiful.

Indeed, the calculations are that the vents are spewing minerals at such a rate that there are nine pounds of gold for each human being on earth, by most estimates.

What are the logistics of mining gold in the sea? Well principally the proper machinery and a close next enough funding to mine the minerals and to surmount the innumerable challenges posed by government restrictions, fisheries and environmentalists alike.

The first indication of some such problems are coming to the fore in Papua New Guinea, where the company Nautilus Minerals hopes to be the first sea floor mining operation.  The government of N. Guinea granted the company the permission to mine its waters, in the Bismarck Sea. 

In fact, Nautilus' spokeperson, ms. Smith, has declared that sea mining is much safer and environmentally friendly than gold mining done on earth. 

Such a statement however, was challenged immediately by scientist, who pointed to the fact that the pressure at those depths is 160 times that on earth, and where temperature near vents goes from freezing to a few hundred degrees in a blink, the risks do not seem so slight.  Nautilus' response is that robotic and remote controlled machinery will be employed so that loss of life is not expected. 

However, such remote controlled machinery would remove water and rocks through a pipeline, after cutting up the seabed and sucking up the contents to a ship where the content would be separated and then the viable rocks sent to a facility for separation, while the other part would be dumped back into the water.

However, the regions near the vents, as frightful as they may be, are teeming with life, rendering the assertion of safety and low environmental impact hard to believe. Some such life forms are crabs, tubeworms, snails, octopi and skates.  

In fact these creatures seem to feed on the very same minerals these companies are seeking to mine. The minerals in effect have become nutrients that replace the sunlight, which is the source of life for creatures that live in the shallows or higher water.

Scientists are indeed scrambling to figure what exactly would be the consequences of such mining on the sea floor and its creatures.  In fact, Cindy Van Dover, who was aboard the Alvin, the manned submersible from Woods Hole Oceanographic institute, contends that despite the strides that have been made to understand the ecology of sea vents, the science in incredibly young.  Indeed such vents were not even identified until 1977.

What most ecological activists are preoccupied with, and it is a valid question, is how can we put in place safeguards to protect the sea floor and its creatures when their ecology is still mostly unknown?  If the impacts were known, then there could be a valid debate, but without such knowledge, there could be a rush to mining without the proper safeguards put in place.

An additional concern is the impact on fisheries on the coasts of N, Guines, where fisherman are requesting answers to the question of what toxic or heavy metals and substances could be stirred and dredged up by the mining operation, questions that the mining companies are failing to answer.

The other concern some activists have is that the govt of N. Guinea has a 30% contract stake in the mined material, making the govt a solid party in the mining operation, a conflict of interest in any environmental protection of the land it governs.

The only obstacle to mass mining of the ocean floor is funding.  The cost of sea mining are staggering, and it is at this time, the only thing that stands between the mining companies and the start of operations. Indeed most of the mining companies are struggling to raise the funds necessary to start.

For now, the ocean floor remains safe....but for how long?

Adapted from: National Geographic Daily news 2.2.13