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World's First Deep-Sea Mining Venture to Launch in 2019
- snerbles 10y agoI remember an '80s-era middle school science textbook touting seabed manganese nodules as the future of mining, driving mass underwater settlement.
- rbobby 10y ago> manganese nodules Hah! Except that was a CIA cover story used when they tried to recover a sunken Russian sub: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSF_Explorer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSF_Explorer
- Tuna-Fish 10y agoWell, manganese nodules are a real thing, and are of some value. They just used them as the cover when they needed to develop underwater recovery technology.
- ptaipale 10y agoManganese nodules also feature heavily in Desmond Bagley's thriller "Night of error", which was published posthumously in 1984. Not quite as good as his earlier books but still enjoyable.
- beamatronic 10y agoThat article got dark, fast. "The robots will lumber across the ocean floor on mammoth treads, grinding and chewing the encrusted seabed, sending plumes of sediment into the surrounding waters and killing marine life that gets in their way."
- FullMtlAlcoholc 10y agoSounds like regular extractive mining to me. I guess it's not talked about as much but terraforming large parts of earth and setting off huge explosions tends to kill whatever was living in the vicinity or its habitat
- hueving 10y ago> I guess it's not talked about as much but terraforming large parts of earth and setting off huge explosions tends to kill whatever was living in the vicinity or its habitat A typical pit mine covers a smaller area than any kind of reasonable-sized farm. Farming is significantly worse when it comes to displaced things in the habitat. You could argue about bad mines that pollute downstream rivers, but that's not how all mines operate and has nothing to do with the precision explosions (I suggest you watch videos of how pits are mined to get a sense of how the explosions actually work) or the displaced wildlife.
- FullMtlAlcoholc 10y agoIn this debate over climate change the pollution human activity causes gets lost in the debate. Extractive mining is terrible for the environment and ecosystems. One of the biggest reasons why I am supporter of SpaceX is that they will facilitate asteroid mining. It'd be kind of funny if Ridley-Scott retconned the origin the Weyland-Yutani Corp to make them eco-saviors for taking resource extraction completely off-world
- vkou 10y agoThe energy requirements of getting things into space, and moving things in space around makes asteroid mining an unmitigated environmental disaster.
- krasin 10y agoNot necessarily, if at some point a space colony is sustainable and mostly sends things down the gravity well, rather than up.
- vkou 10y agoStill not the case, because they need to redirect asteroids into low earth orbit/the orbit of the colony. (And then expend a ton of energy to match orbits.) The economics of asteroid mining only make sense if you're: 1. Using the mined materials for space construction. But why are you doing space construction in the first place? So you can do more asteroid mining? So you can do more space construction? 2. You've found an asteroid made of pure unobtanium.
- nabla9 10y agoWast areas of deep sea floors (abyssal plains) are ecologically desert and they cover wast areas. Very little nutrition and life. Only small oasis like whale carcass is full of life. Of course there may be unintended consequences. Its unclear to me where these mining operations take place. It seems that these ventures are trying to mine at the depth of 1600 m. Continental shelf has more life than continental slope or abyssal plains.
- bbernard 10y agoElon Musk has already said that burning fossils fuels and pumping it into the atmosphere is the "dumbest experiment in history". So I guess we've just found the second dumbest one. I just can't understand why some people think that this is a good idea.
- sqeaky 10y agoThey already have government oversight. They already have a plan for minimizing pollution, which is wasted material that could be mined and therefore lost money. They come from a western country with a decent environmental track record. It doesn't seem intellectually honest to compare 1 company mining in a situation where polluting is economically disadvantageous and has the science to understand at least some of the risks to climate change. With climate change we built several giant industries cars, power, and others that burned huge amount of fossil fuels before we knew the risks. And generally polluting is economically advantageous.
- codewritinfool 10y agoGlomar Explorer
- MBCook 10y agoThat (and "this is how you create Kaiju" [2]) is what I was thinking. For those who don't recognize it, "Glomar" is short for "Global Marine" and was a fake company setup by Howard Huges to do seafloor mining. It was actually a front where Huges helped the US government try to recover a sunken Russian sub. It's notable for being the case that caused the phrase "Can neither confirm nor deny" to have to be created, which is why it's called the "Glomar response". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_response https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_response [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiju https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiju
- phtevus 10y agoCame here pretty much to see if anyone would make this comment. Kudos
- dbg31415 10y ago> The smallest of the robots weighs 200 tons. How will they do work on these robots, or bring them home, if they break? I just saw a zany Mark Wahlberg movie about how hard it was to do underwater repairs... they should give it a watch.
- ThrustVectoring 10y agoFloat them to the surface, likely. There's already something similar set up to float the collected materials up to the surface.
- marricks 10y agoI have two responses to news like this, first my child self thinking how cool it is to have giant deep sea robots, and then the more cynical adult me realizing we're in a mad extinction event with multiple paths to our own destruction and oil, mining, animal ag, and governments generally not doing anything, or actively resisting change while chasing the next gold mine. It's depressing.
- aaron695 10y agoThat's a shame because the world is a hell of a lot better place than when you were a child and also has lots of cool stuff. And it's only getting better. I wonder why old age makes many people despondent.
- marricks 10y ago"Better" is entirely too vague. Sure, I can get a VR headset now which is awesome, but the middle east is even more unstable now and thousands of species have gone extinct since then. For a lot of people the core idea that "the world is slowly improving" is so fundamental they miss seeing basic ways many things have gotten worse.
- bborud 10y agoIt makes people despondent because they realize that cynicism takes decades to learn.
- deelowe 10y agoThat's a fair bit of dissonance for anyone who's following climate change research.
- TaylorAlexander 10y agoThe world is getting better and worse. Technology is better but the natural world is suffering destruction at a rate that is increasing. Animal populations have been decimated[1] and natural forests have been too. If you care about what the planet will be like in 200 years, things haven't gotten better. [1] http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37775622 http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37775622
- loufe 10y agoWhat the article neglects to mention is that there are sea mining operations which have been operating for decades now (for the most vivid example see diamonds in Namibia). What sets this apart is the depth at which they're mining and the type of mining (grinding as opposed to, effectively, sieving)
- ptaipale 10y agoBTW, around here in Finland we had an undersea iron mine at the island of Jussarö. It last operated in 1954-1967. Location: https://goo.gl/maps/FoJeqJRUS6R2 https://goo.gl/maps/FoJeqJRUS6R2 It's probably not unique; are there similar mines elsewhere? (I.e. the mine shaft is on dry land, but mine tunnels reach to dig minerals from areas that are actually underneath the sea floor).
- porsupah 10y agoIndeed - the world's largest salt mine operates largely beneath Lake Huron: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKIuj4n_8PQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKIuj4n_8PQ
- desdiv 10y agoSimilar island in Japan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashima_Island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashima_Island
- jdhawk 10y agoQuick - time to start an "Ocean Free - Environmentally Controlled Metals" certification. We could make....10's of dollars
- mrfusion 10y agoI don't understand how it identifies the valuable metals? Or it just sends all the dirt up?
- patrickg_zill 10y agoSeems that the filtering occurs on the ship. A slurry is pumped up to the ship, where filtering occurs, with the sand being returned to the site.
- undersuit 10y agoSand is a very benign word for what is going to be tailings.
- mirimir 10y agoWow, they're going after the mid-ocean ridges. That makes sense, I guess. But damn, those are some very unique ecosystems.
- abraves10001 10y agoThat are going to be being mashed by 200+ ton machines. Gotta get in before the regulations!
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- jcoffland 10y ago> The cargo is then transferred to a transport vessel and sent directly to customers in China. Because China does not have the environmental and safety laws that we do and can therefore process ore at a fraction of the cost. This is a major loophole that let's Western companies pollute indirectly and not pay for it.
- ptenk 10y agoThis is unlikely to happen. I've been following this industry and have seen so many failures thus far, that Nautilus will not be anywhere ready for mining by 2019.