A recent news story highlights the surge in activity in deep sea mining in the Pacific, including New Zealand. While Oceans and Communities has been monitoring this growth in mining, one of the more revealing sections of the article points out how this new extractive industry would not have been possible without the “subsidy” of government sponsored research.
This raises the larger question of whether some things, such as the deep ocean, are best left alone, especially when scientific exploration opens the door to exploitation and potential devastation.
In response to news that River Neptune Minerals is seeking licenses to mine seafloor massive sulphide deposits off New Zealand:
Dr de Ronde of GNS Science in Wellington notes that these “very serious players” are benefiting, to a large degree, from data that New Zealand scientists have been collecting for about a decade.
The scientists were among the first to discover that deep underwater hydro-thermal vents were creating mineral-rich chimneys in vast fields.
The article further states:
Neptune acknowledges it is benefiting from the New Zealand government work, calling it “significant academic research”.
And this use of government research data has also benefited Nautilus which is active in Papua New Guinea and Tonga.
The article states:
Nautilus has become the world leader in undersea mining, exploiting SMS data collected by Australian government scientists in Papua New Guinea waters.
And that…
In Tonga last week 10 Nautilus staff joined the University of Hawaii exploration ship Kilo Moana, which Nautilus has chartered to survey the Valu Fa, 2000 metres below the surface.
Researchers and miners are making odd bedfellows. Publicly funded resources are being rented out or seized in the name of commercial exploration and potentially widespread destruction of ocean ecosystems through the use of unproven and largely experimental mining techniques.
Deep sea mining for minerals has never occurred before and we do not know the full range of environmental risks at this point.
I can understand some of the arguments that scientists will make about this relationship with miners:
- It allows scientists to develop a baseline for what is there.
- It allows the development of a framework for protection.
But those frameworks for protection are always political and lag far behind the economic juggernauts who want access to the resources without the constraints of regulations or standards. Will mining begin before there has been a protection framework that has been guided by all this scientific data being gathered? Is the scientific threshold for commercial exploration lower than the threshold for developing protective measures?
Additionally, publicly funded government research is being used to benefit private economic activity without any substantial recovery of those invested government funds beyond standard fees and applications.
It is imperative that science be used to guide policy development ahead of permitting commercial mining of the deep ocean. Otherwise, the role of deep sea scientists may be relegated to witnessing and documenting the decline of this incredible ocean wilderness.
