“The fate of the deep sea and the fate of our planet are intimately intertwined. That we should be considering the destruction of these places and the multitude of species they support – before we have even understood them and the role they play in the health of our planet – is beyond reason.” Sir David Attenborough
With the increasing demand for electric cars and the development of renewable energy technologies, deep-sea mining has been presented as a potent and financially smart solution to the climate crisis, purportedly satisfying the demand for rare minerals, mainly for battery production and climate action projects.
Having depleted most of the easy-to-extract terrestrial supplies of minerals such as copper, nickel, aluminium, manganese, zinc, and lithium, countries and mining industries are now turning towards exploiting the ocean seabed. Between economic opportunity, geopolitical governance and environmental concerns, this activity is facing increasing criticism from NGOs, countries, and environmental groups.
Before we address the origins of the destructive colonial belief that the seabed is a locus that companies and countries can tamper with and extract from, we need first to get a quick glimpse into the prospective industry’s environmental impacts and the financial, legal, and social controversies surrounding it. Only then can a discussion on the behavioural changes required to halt this practice take place.
Deep Sea Mining in a Nutshell
What exactly is deep-sea mining?
In summary, it is the excavation of ocean minerals at a depth greater than 200m. These minerals form incredibly slowly (2-15mm over 1 million years) but could be removed in a day. Since May 2022, 31 contracts for deep-sea extraction covering more than 1.5 million ㎢ have been issued. These are mostly international waters, therefore outside of most countries’ national legislation. Governance over such practices is solely managed by the International Seabed Authority (ISA), which has full control over new deep-sea mining permits.
Concerns over the International Seabed Authority
In an investigation, the LA Times raised concerns over the funding and the closeness of the organisation with mining companies. The main arguments centred around conflicts of interest, with the ISA recently launching a new seabed mining company named ‘Enterprise’ whilst being in charge of seabed mining lacking adequate environmental regulations. Recently, 10 nations including Chile, the United Kingdom, and Australia, as well as Greenpeace, accused the authority of not being strict enough over ecological evaluation requirements and emphasised ISA’s blatant disregard of calls from the scientific community for more research on the potential damage that the practice can cause.
“It’s extremely concerning” that the ISA “would be in charge of running a business that it is also in charge of regulating.” Arlo Hemphill, Greenpeace
Environmental impacts of deep-sea extraction
The impacts of deep-sea mining on the Earth’s biorhythms have not yet been fully calculated by scientists. However, what we already know is a cause of deep concern.
Firstly, the disturbance of the seafloor is a significant issue. The deep sea makes up 90% of the marine environment, being the largest and oldest habitat on Earth, home to as many as 100 million species. Despite this vastness, just 5% of the ocean is estimated to have been explored (Sustainable Ocean Alliance). From hydrothermal vents to deep trenches, the deep seabed’s various loci host a great diversity of organisms endemic to these environments, having adapted over millennia to such extreme conditions. The digging and gouging of the ocean floor by machines destructively alters deep-sea habitats, leading to the loss of species that we haven’t even discovered and that are “found nowhere else” (International Union for Conservation of Nature).
Furthermore, deep-sea mining disrupts the seabed’s carbon-absorbing capacity. Life on Earth would not be possible without the deep sea, as it absorbs more than 90% of the excess heat by buffering our terrestrial greenhouse gas emissions and absorbing carbon. By disrupting the carbon sinks that exist on the ocean floor, weakening the biological pump—a crucial mechanism that transfers carbon from the surface to the deep ocean—and releasing stored methane, deep-sea mining diminishes the ocean’s role as one of our most important natural climate regulators. This would lead to a much faster destabilization of the climate compared to current estimates (earthrise.studio).
Lastly, pollution from the release of sediment plumes and toxic metals presents another major concern. The discharge of wastewater full of suspended particles spreads sediment plumes for hundreds of kilometers, severely affecting entire populations of fish and mammal species. This pollution causes respiratory and auditory distress, impacts stress hormone levels, and leads to reduced feeding, visual and auditory communication, and affects reproduction and migration patterns.
“We’re about to make one of the biggest transformations humans have ever made to the surface of the planet. We’re going to strip mine a massive habitat and once it’s gone it’s never coming back” Jeff Drazen, oceanographer, University of Hawai’i (qtd in Reid 73)
Financial Risks and Legal Updates
The Deep Seabed Mining Industry is in its infancy, which means that aside from initial tests and deep-sea exploration, full-scale commercial mining is yet to commence. But all this is about to change as previously colonial countries and battery production companies are actively supporting the industry, with the United States actively paving the way for massive deep-sea extraction (see for example ‘The Responsible Use of Seafloor Resources Act of 2024’, introduced by Congress members Carol Miller and John Joyce). With the ecological acts of violence of the process cloaked within legal strategies and justified on the grounds of economic accumulation, the recognition of the ocean’s agency gives way under the weight of commercial interests.
International opposition is steadily increasing. Recently surfaced financial analysis from the World Bank, the European Investment Bank and the UNEP-FI portrays seabed mining as a not financially viable investment (The Ocean Foundation). Meanwhile, a 2016 published report from the Institute for Sustainable Futures found that “a transition to 100% renewables is possible without deep-sea mining resources” (Teske et al 37). This has led car and tech businesses including BMW, Volvo, Google, Samsung and Ford to invest in battery innovation and new chemistries that avoid ocean-mined minerals. At the same time, 25 countries including Canada, Mexico, France, Spain and Germany, along with Indigenous scientists and civil groups are calling for legal action: either a moratorium, precautional pause to allow more studies, or a total ban on deep-sea mining. Among them, Pacific nations such as Palau, Fiji, Samoa, the Federal States of Micronesia and Hawai’i cite tourism and cultural heritage risks, recognising the deep-sea’s irreplaceable cultural value worldwide.
“Deep-sea mining is an unproven industrial endeavour fraught with technical, financial, and regulatory uncertainty, lacking in social license (Indigenous opposition, human rights), and carrying significant potential and legal liabilities for both public and private investors” oceanfdn.org
Scrambling for the Deep: The Legacies that Established Blue Extractivism as the Last Frontier of Colonial Material Predation
As we stand at a turning point for humanity’s dealings with the deep sea, there are important choices to make if we want to grasp this crucial once-in-a-generation opportunity to thwart an extractive, unsustainable and extremely harmful industry before it has even begun. But for any change to take place, there's a need for a shift in behaviour; and any of the latter immediately needs a shift in perception. How are we perceiving the Deep? How did it come to be associated with profit? The scramble for the ocean floor is not a sudden rush but, according to Helen Scales, “the culmination of a contemplation of the seabed that’s been going on for more than fifty years” (Scales 234).
A 1965 book by American mining engineer John Mero called The Mineral Resources of the Sea, transformed the view of the seabed from a curiosity into a potential resource to be mined. Extractivism is not a new issue; it is a centuries-old colonial model of acquiring wealth through extracting raw materials from ‘sacrificial zones’ for profit. The goal is to mine a resource on a one-shot basis, then move on elsewhere and repeat. We’ve seen it in gold, diamond, and coal mines, oil rigs, and the felling of old-growth forests. The model turns places into so-called sacrificial zones, places that are destroyed for economic gain.
The seabed is an ideal sacrificial zone. Far away from humanity, or at least far from the Western industrialised states, it offers a unique profiting chance for the latter, which are growing increasingly uncomfortable with their reliance on countries in the Global South for raw materials. Regulations are still loose and as we saw above, subject to manipulation and lobbying. The Law of the Seas (made by the UN in 1982) stipulates that 200 nautical miles beyond every shore is officially the high seas, a vast area covering more than half of the planet. The seabed below these waters, named “The Area” in Article 136, as well as its resources “are the common heritage of mankind”. Both the name given to the biologically and geologically diverse seabed realm that lies beyond national jurisdiction and the latter statement are deliberately vague.
Through its abstractions, the UN Law of the Seas “renders this deep living realm as a quarry” (Reid 75). Aided by these, the ISA allows states for a price of half a million dollars to apply for a mining ‘exploration’ permit for a piece of the seabed inside the area of their choosing, which, if commercial seabed mining is approved, will become mining permits. In this way, the deep sea mining industry is quickly becoming the “poster industry for blue capitalism”, with seabed worlds being “appropriated into regimes of global capital” (Reid 71), lucratively called “blue economy” or “blue extractivism”, as if “blue” naturalisation of terms makes extractivism somehow more benign while foreclosing relations of ethical responsibility towards the oceans and the living and non-living entities dependent on them.
The narrative of the seabed as the “last unexplored frontier,” which gives rise to the scramble for its resources, has various precedents, namely the scramble for the Arctic – which continues with great zest -, to remote corners of the Pacific Ocean until some decades ago, even the exploration of extra-terrestrial space. The conceptual roots of sea mining are based on the narrative surrounding places away from metropolitan centres, away from humanity. Fixed notions, cultivated by scientific accounts such as John Mero’s, of the seabed as barren, empty, devoid of life, terra extremis or rather terra nulla, gave rise to depictions of the deep sea in Western media as an un-real, primordial, mythic realm, that holds great promise combined with stalking lethality (as we saw with the coverage of the implosion of the Titan submersible earlier in the year); where Westerners achieve either greatness or death.
These discourses, at best of barrenness, otherworldliness and alienness - imposed on both the creatures of the deep sea and the oceanic landscape - and at worst of hostility and vengeance, have enabled, sustained and amplified colonial and capitalist legacies of exploitation, testing, probing, drilling and eventually extraction through unimaginable destruction; beginning always with “exploration.”
At the time it was thought that deep sea fields of minerals were little more than rocks scattered across empty mud. But it is now being discovered that the deep sea is a special place filled with far more life than expected. These “rocks of minerals” are not just “bare pebbles” but rather, according to marine biologist Helen Scales, “oases of life in the abyss, creating microhabitats” (246). She recounts that between 60 and 70% of the animals in the deep sea are dependent on the rocks, making them as vital to abyssal ecosystems “as trees are to forests” (246). That would severely change with mining, whose impacts would “ripple multidimensionally and multi-temporally” through these seabed ecologies (Reid 70).
As international authorities and mining companies with naturalised and vague terminologies keep people blissfully unaware of what the spectre of deep sea mining looks like, the visualisation of the predatory and violent nature of extraction is an important tool for behavioural change. Mining companies are developing various designs for mineral collecting machines; it all looks disturbingly hellish. A common design would crawl along on caterpillar tracks, trampling and flattening the animals unable to get out of the way, pulverising ancient ecosystems that have survived there for millions of years. Another design opts for pushing “rows of metal teeth a few centimetres into the soft seabed to scrape and scoop up entire parches of the ocean floor [..]”. Others would resemble “vacuum cleaners, with hydraulic pumps that suck up” a mixture of rocks, water and any living thing within reach, which would then be pumped to the surface, rattling and clattering all the way. (Scales 249). Bringing these images to the fore configures extraction as a form of what Susan Reid calls “material predation” (71), highlighting the vulnerability of ocean worlds and urging us to reconsider our stance towards them.
There is a tangible sense, within the scientific community, of the unstoppable momentum of an industry backed by powerful lobbies against which it’s quite impossible to battle. “Even if we found unicorns living on the seafloor, I don’t think it would necessarily stop mining,” says Daniel Jones, of the British National Oceanography Centre (qtd in Scales 263). Activism and grassroots advocacy, however, is going strong.
With more people beginning to understand the vital role of the deep sea in our livelihoods and futures, there is a growing formation of coalitions around the world that are questioning, opposing, protesting, and even disrupting this harmful industry in its infancy. Resistance takes place in the streets, in decision-making centres, in extraction facilities, on social media, in companies’ AGMs. Indigenous groups, youth, policymakers, scientists and everyday people are tirelessly defending the deep and posing necessary questions: If we need to extract minerals to live well, how do we do this ethically? How do we extend hospitality to the worlds of our prey?
This has already yielded significant tangible results. In July, ocean champion Hawai’i Governor Josh Green signed the Hawai’i Seabed Mining Prevention Act (SB 2575) into law, prohibiting the mining, extraction, and removal of minerals from the seabed in all state marine waters and preventing the issuance of permits associated with seabed mining activities. This win was made possible by the hundreds of young people, the Kānaka ‘Ōiwi of Hawai’i, NGOs, political leaders, and more. Furthermore, Peru and Greece have recently become the 26th and 27th ISA member states announcing their support to a moratorium on deep-sea mining.
The above coincide with a groundbreaking new discovery published in Nature GeoScience in July revealing that polymetallic nodules (the primary target of the dee-sea mining industry) are more than just a ‘lump of minerals’ sitting on the seafloor but are actually helping to produce oxygen through electrolysis of seawater. This completely changes our understanding of the planet’s oxygen production systems and further highlights the critical need for precautionary approaches in extractive activities like deep-sea mining.
Any of us can decide to become an active part of that process by changing first the way we think about the deep and then taking active steps towards defending it, so that we can have a future that doesn’t necessitate the exploitation of the deep that would lead to the hastening collapse of ecosystems and the climate.
Not so very long ago, the deep sea was a tremendous void containing only myths, legends and endless unknowns. Today we know a great deal and tomorrow more. And yet our accumulated knowledge still shrinks in comparison to what remains to be learned about this incredible space. Whenever and wherever someone explores, the window into exploitation opens a little wider. We need to do all we can to keep that window from opening fully.
Want to get regular updates on deep sea mining and take action? Here are some organisations and groups you can start with:
Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, gathering 90 environmental groups
Sustainable Ocean Alliance, mobilizing young people and solutions to restore the health of the ocean within our lifetime
The Ocean Foundation, the only community foundation sponsoring solutions for the protection of the ocean
Look_down_action, a global youth organisation rallying to #StopDeepSeaMining
FutureSwell, ocean conservation media
Chilli.app, the world's first climate platform for direct digital action, made for activists by activists.
Edited by Thenthamizh SS and Eshal Zahur
Illustration by Mrittika Mitra
Fani Apospori (she/her) has just finished an MSc in Literature and Modernity with Distinction at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland), and is a climate writer at Political Pandora. She is particularly interested in the deconstruction of disciplinary boundaries in the humanities and beyond and is seeking to employ new ways of using arts and culture to reframe and diversify climate narratives, particularly in coastal countries.
She is currently engaged in community-led climate action communications and engagement in the UK, specializing in environmental justice through multimedia storytelling.
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References
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Khan, Yusuf. “U.S. Lawmakers Push for Deep-Sea Mining Funding in New Bill.” Wall Street Journal, 12 March 2024, www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-lawmakers-to-push-for-deep-sea-mining-funding-in-new-bill-cc020f7d, accessed 02 July 2024.
Mero, John L. The Mineral Resources of the Sea, Elsevier Pub. Co., 1965.
Reid, Susan. “Imagining Justice with the Abyssal Ocean.” Laws of the Sea: Interdisciplinary Currents, edited by Irus Braverman, Routledge, 2023, pp. 68–91.
Scales, Helen. The Brilliant Abyss: True Tales of Exploring the Deep Sea, Discovering Hidden Life and Selling the Seabed, Bloomsbury, 2022.
Teske, Sven et al. Renewable Energy and Deep-Sea Mining: Supply, Demand and Scenarios. Institute for Sustainable Futures, July 2016, Microsoft Word - DSM - RE resource Report_9_FINAL DRAFT-NEWTITLE-ANDNAME.docx (eu-midas.net), accessed 02 July 2024.
“Rep. Miller Introduces Bill to Support Deep-Seabed Nodule Collection and Domestic Processing to Strengthen National Security and Energy Independence.” Carol Miller House, 12 March 2024, miller.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-miller-introduces-bill-support-deep-seabed-nodule-collection-and-domestic, accessed 02 July 2024.
“Campaign Against Deep-Seabed Mining.” Sustainable Ocean Alliance, Campaign Against Deep-Seabed Mining (soalliance.org), accessed 02 July 2024.
“Issues Brief: Deep Sea Mining.” International Union for the Conservation of Nature, May 2022, https://www.iucn.org/resources/issues-brief/deep-sea-mining#:~:text=At%20the%20IUCN%20World%20Conservation,number%20of%20conditions%20are%20met, accessed 02 July 2024.
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