How Much Gold In Ocean – Trillions of metal sheets on the sea floor could help stop global warming, but mining could harm the ocean’s ecosystem.
On display at the recently opened exhibition Our Broken Planet at the History Museum. London Natural History Museum, curators placed a small dark material covered with light traces. Black lumps can easily be mistaken for charcoal. However, its true nature is very interesting.
How Much Gold In Ocean
The raw materials are polymetallic crystals, and oceanographers have discovered trillions of them sitting on the Earth’s ocean floor. Each is rich in manganese, nickel, cobalt and copper, some of the most important ingredients for making the electric cars, wind turbines and solar panels we need to replace the carbon dioxide trucks, power plants and factories that are destroying our climate today.
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Therefore, these pieces of metal can help save humanity from the ravages of global warming, said mining companies that say their extraction should be considered an international priority. By digging holes from the depths, we can slow down the burning of the destroyed surface of our planet.
“We need large amounts of manganese, nickel, cobalt and copper to build electric cars and power plants,” said Hans Smit, chief executive of Florida-based Oceans Minerals, which announced the mine plans. “We cannot increase the land’s supply of these metals without contributing to significant impact on the environment. The only option is in the ocean.”
Other researchers disagree – vehemently. They said that deep sea mining would be a disaster for the oceans. There is already our pressure, full of rubber and too hot. The gentle and long-lived inhabitants of polychaete worms, sea cucumbers, fish and squid – will be destroyed by dredging. At the same time, the toxic mud will be sent to the food chain in the sea as a poison.
British marine biologist Helen Scales said “it is difficult to imagine that marine mining can be carried out without devastating species and ecosystems,” a view shared by David Attenborough, who has called for a halt to all deep-sea mining plans. “Mining means destruction, and in this case it means destroying ecosystems that we know very little about,” he said.
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It is a highly controversial argument. On the one hand, supporters of nodule mining claim that it can save the world, while opponents warn that it can cause new ecological chaos. For better or worse, these minerals will play an important role in determining our future – either by freeing us from our current ecological problems or by causing more damage.
Deep water manganese fields in Hawaii. Photo: Office of Oceanography and Research OAA
Polymetallic minerals were first discovered during the 1872-1876 voyage of HMS Challenger, whose voyage around the world laid the foundation for modern oceanography. Raised from the sea floor more than 4,000 meters deep, they were originally thought to be made of volcanic rock and salt. They were later shown to grow by absorbing metal compounds from seawater.
“Rocks usually form around objects – like shells – that fall to the sea floor,” said Adrian Glover, a marine biologist at the Natural History Museum in London. “The one I just revealed was built around the teeth of a megalodon, a giant shark that went extinct over 3 million years ago. That shows how long it takes for a large plume to grow on the sea floor – about one centimeter every million years.”
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Despite this rate of increase over eons, trillions of nodules cover the ocean floor. Some regions are filled with them so densely that it looks like a stone road. The Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) – which stretches from Mexico to Hawaii and covers more than 4 million square kilometers of seabed – is particularly rich in nodules, with estimates indicating six times more cobalt and three times more nickel than in Reserve all the land of the world.
These riches have attracted the attention of mining and drilling companies, which are currently in contact to obtain approval to explore the Clarion-Clipperton. So far, more than 20 exploration contracts have been awarded by the International Maritime Organization (ISA), the organization The United Nations is responsible for controlling mining in international waters.
Eventually, these companies hope to convert their mining contracts into deep mining licenses and bring them to the surface. It will not be an easy task. In the dark ocean floor, the pressure is 500 times higher than the surface, equivalent to sitting under the wings of dozens of jumbo jets.
To overcome these obstacles, a large surface vessel will be necessary – a low tube attached to robotic bulldozers, which will then descend across the deep sea floor, suck up the rock before pumping it back to the surface at a distance of five kilometers from the head.
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Ambitious voice. However, mining companies are optimistic. “We have built a robotic vessel that crosses the seas to search for diamonds off the coast of Namibia and build deepwater pipelines,” said Laurens de Jonge, offshore mining manager at Royal IHC, a Dutch provider of offshore drilling technology.
Mining on this scale makes marine biologists nervous – because the impact on life in the deep sea could be profound and far-reaching.
“Abyss means working at a greater depth and pressure, which will certainly involve new challenges, including our main objective: limiting the impact on the environment as much as possible. However, we do not expect that significant differences will occur between previous operations and future nodule mining. I expect that when a company has decided to carry out mining in the sea and having received the mining permit, they may start operating in about 3 years.”
As part of its plan, Royal IHC has designed a robot with a width of 16 meters and built a three-meter test vehicle – called Apollo II – which will be able to collect about 400 tons of nodules in an hour and pump it up. During two weeks of operation, more than 100,000 tons can be disposed of in this way. And after 25 to 30 years of operation – the expected limit of an ISA exploration license – about 10,000 square kilometers of seabed can be explored.
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Extraction on this scale blinds many marine biologists – because the impact on life in the deep sea could be profound and widespread, a point highlighted by marine biologist Callum Roberts, from the University of York. “Nundin provides the only solid substrate in the thousands of square kilometers of fine sediment flows that cover the Abyssal Plain,” he said. “They are important attachment points for a variety of animals that cannot live directly in the mud.”
These inhabitants include sea urchins, sponges, corals, nematodes and microscopic animals called tardigrades, as well as octopuses, which have recently been discovered to lay eggs in the sponges attached to the nodules. “Animal biomass in sediments is very low,” said Duke University ocean biologist Cindy van Dover. “However, the diversity is very high.”
In fact, many species have yet to be discovered in the abyss, scientists say, and many will be destroyed by deep-sea mining before they can be identified. “As mining machines thunder along the coast, they create dense clouds of mud in the water because there is no strong current to disperse them,” Scales said in his recent book,
. “Soft animals that are trapped in these clouds and cannot swim, such as fish and sponges, will be suffocated and suffocated.”
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And there will be no chance to recover quickly from the attack. In these depths, where food and energy are limited, life proceeds at an exceptionally slow pace. Populations can take centuries to recover.
These dangers were summarized in a recent report by Fauna and Flora International. “Deep-sea mining will cause extensive habitat loss,” it said. “It will also produce sediments that will disrupt the functioning and behavior of deep-sea ecosystems, suffocating basic ecological processes over large areas.”
For their part, mining companies have emphasized that they do not intend to begin mining until a full environmental assessment of their proposal is completed. These are now being worked on by ecologists, marine biologists and oceanographers.
Additionally, companies such as Ocean Minerals highlight the damage caused by mines that create sinkholes, cause biodiversity loss and cause widespread soil and surface contamination. “In our view, the impact of nodule mining will be less than the equivalent impact of land mining for the amount of metal we need in the future,” said Smit.
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The pressure to obtain these metals in sufficient quantities is sure to become intense, analysts agree. One estimate by the World Bank suggests that a 500% increase in coal production would be needed. In 2050, if the demand for electric car batteries and turbine production will be met. However, opponents of deep mining said that the forecast does not justify plowing the abyssal plain and pointed to two other methods – metal recycling and alternative green technology – that can reduce the need to mine cobalt, manganese, nickel.
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