A British Columbia-based company is aiming to unleash a new era of resource extraction, raising questions about how to protect the planet’s deep-sea ecosystems we know the least about.
In 1983, the Verena Tunnicliffe was drifting about 250 kilometers off the coast of Vancouver Island when a call came over the radio that geologists on a nearby sister ship had unearthed something strange from the seabed.
“We’ve got all these weird smelly worms,” Tunnicliffe remembers them saying. “Do you want them?”
The deep-sea explorer was the only one with a submarine, and a year later her research team had raised enough money to return.
When Tunnicliffe finally descended more than 2,000 meters to a patch of ocean floor, all was dark except for the submarine’s light.
Beneath them, two tectonic plates are diverging, allowing cold seawater to seep through the Earth’s crust. Superheated by molten lava, the water flows back into the ocean as a 400 degree Celsius hot soup of nutrients and chemicals.
The crew crept along the bottom in an exercise that Tunnicliffe described as “an attempt to explore the Rockies with a flashlight.”
White mats of bacteria appeared first. Then out of the darkness emerged huge mounds of “gorgeous” white tubeworms, the five-foot-long creatures covered in red feathers. Inside, the scientist would later find out that they had no guts, but a body full of vent-fed bacteria that fed the worms.
And in a potential window into the origins of life on a hot, young Earth, a bacterium found in British Columbia vents was later found to survive temperatures of 121 C – the hottest upper limit for life.
“Just covered, dripping with animals,” Tunnicliffe said, pointing to at least 12 different species found there and not seen anywhere else on Earth.
A year later, Tunnicliffe would discover vents on a massive scale, hydrothermal vents that form chimneys up to 45 meters high, known as “black smokers”.
Over 800 extinct and active chimneys would be discovered in the coming decades. The deep-sea scientist will have 10 underwater creatures named after her and will be awarded the Order of Canada for her pioneering work.
Rising to the height of buildings, underwater vents and their chimneys can often contain ore metal deposits of gold, copper and silver – making them an attractive potential source of wealth, if only someone could figure out how to mine them.
A vast array of life gathers around the ‘black smokers’, which spew water superheated to 380 degrees Celsius and form part of Endeavour’s hot vents, the first such places to be protected in the world. – Photo by Verena Tunnicliffe
By 2003, the Endeavor Hydrothermal vents will be the first marine protected area in Canada and the first “hot vents” protected from human exploitation in the world.
But in other parts of the deep ocean, a battle that had simmered quietly for decades was about to enter a new phase of heightened tension, raising the prospect of a race for some of the ocean’s deepest known riches.
At the center of the dispute is The Metals Company, a Vancouver-based mining firm that wants to extract the minerals it needs to wean the world off fossil fuels and onto a more sustainable path.
The US Geological Survey found this year that deep-sea mines could supply up to 45 percent of all the world’s critical metal needs by 2065.
But for scientists like Tunnicliffe, the race to the bottom of one of the planet’s least-explored realms comes with huge risks, both for its poorly understood ecosystems and their connection to an oceanic carbon pump estimated to clean up 30 percent of greenhouse, man-made gas emissions from the atmosphere each year.
“We’re talking about a group of organisms that have changed the way we understand life on this planet, right down to the origins of life, how life functions in extremely extreme conditions where we never thought life could exist,” Tunnicliffe said.
“This fuels our search for life on other planets.”
Three deep-sea treasure pots and a Russian submarine
The first sign that the ocean floor might contain minerals useful to mankind dates back more than 150 years to the HMS Challenger expedition, a voyage that many now consider the foundation of modern oceanography.
The expedition will be the first to explore the Mariana Trench with bathymetric soundings and confirm the existence of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the world’s longest mountain range and the dividing line where two crustal plates are separating, widening the Atlantic seafloor.
But on March 7, 1873, when the expedition’s crew unearthed on the deck “several strange black oval bodies composed of almost pure oxide of manganese,” mankind saw for the first time what wealth lay deep out of sight.
Metal masses begin with a core – a sunken shark tooth, a small fossil, or a piece of basalt rock. Over tens of millions of years, minerals precipitated from the surrounding seawater, forming metal layers one after another.
Often growing to the size of a potato, the nodules are rich in nickel, copper, cobalt and manganese – all metals that are in high demand by battery makers and other technology makers.
They descend 4,000 meters below parts of the Pacific Ocean and can be found scattered across the surface of abyssal plains, flat stretches of relatively unexplored ocean that cover roughly half of Earth’s surface.
But like the precious metals found near some hydrothermal vents, in the past it was either too expensive or the technology didn’t exist to bring the nodules up from the depths.
A polymetallic nodule was captured on a seamount deep in the North Atlantic Ocean during the 2021 North Atlantic Steps Expedition. US Geological Survey and NOAA Ocean Exploration
It would take more than 90 years before the idea of mining for metal nodes again caught the public’s attention.
In 1965, mining engineer John L. Mero published the influential book Mineral Resources of the Sea, sparking widespread interest in the nodules at a time when they were thought to be an endless resource growing faster than they could be harvested.
A year later, Malta’s ambassador to the UN, Arvid Pardo, made an impassioned appeal to the General Assembly, calling on coastal states to end the expansion of exclusive economic zones and to regulate the ocean floor, not just for “those who possess the necessary technology” but ” in the interest of humanity”.
“Here came the idea that whatever we find there really belongs to everyone and should be encouraged for future generations,” Tunnicliffe said.
The issue revolved around the idea that the riches of the ocean should not belong only to the wealthiest nations with the resources to exploit the seabed. This set in motion a multi-decade legal process to regulate mining in international waters.
But the pendulum would continue to swing, and in the early 1970s the commodities boom spurred additional interest in deepwater mining. So when eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes announced he was building a giant ship to mine the ocean’s abyss, the story was plausible.
For the public, the expedition will be the first attempt to mine metal nodules in the deep sea. In reality, it was an elaborate hoax.
In 1968, US authorities learned that the Soviet submarine K-129 had sunk in over 5,000 meters of water, approximately 2,500 kilometers northwest of Hawaii.
Working with Hughes and his new Glomar Explorer ship, the US Central Intelligence Agency plans to take out the submarine and its nuclear-tipped torpedoes.
In 1975, reports in the Los Angeles Times and later The New York Times would reveal the outlines of what some described as “the most daring covert operation in history.”
Project Azorian was one of the most expensive covert operations in CIA history, involving the Howard Hughes-built rescue craft Glomar Explorer (above) and the Soviet submarine K-129, pictured below circa 1968. – Photos via US Government; The CIA
The story has changed over the years, with some suggesting that most of the sub has been recovered, others claiming that it disintegrated when it was pulled from the depths to the ship’s lunar basin.
Whatever the case, the extraordinary stories that emerged from what was declassified as the Azorian Project in 2010 also helped usher in a judgment about who should have access to the depths — and specifically the riches that lie on the Abyss. .
Half a dozen competing international consortia would begin piloting deepwater mining in the late 1970s. But in the early 1980s, commodity prices fell and that work was shelved as companies cut their research budgets. As German historian Ole Sparenberg puts it, deepwater mining was essentially “dead in the water.”
Concerns about the environment and justice for less wealthy nations eventually led the United Nations to establish the International Seabed Authority—also known as the ISA or “The Enterprise”—in 1982 under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), and ratified its existence in a 1994 implementation agreement.
Today, the Jamaica-based organization consists of 167 member states and the European Commission.
Custodian of the deep sea as the “common heritage of mankind”, the ISA’s dual mandate is to facilitate the extraction of mineral resources from the seabed while protecting the deep-sea environment.
The prevailing opinion at the time was that surface mining was much more profitable, “and how are you going to do it anyway?” Tunnicliffe said.
Even if the technology and funding were available to extract the metals from the depths, no regulations existed to allow mining in international waters.
That was until an ambitious company from Vancouver, British Columbia, sparked…
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