Willem Marks
Appearances
NPR News Now
NPR News: 03-22-2025 3PM EDT
An airport spokesperson confirmed Heathrow was, quote, open and fully operational this morning while airlines raced to get stranded passengers whose flights were diverted or cancelled through to their final destinations. The airport added hundreds of additional staff to help 10,000 additional passengers travel through Heathrow from around the world.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 03-22-2025 3PM EDT
but travellers are still being asked to check their flight status as several routes early Saturday had already been cancelled. The shutdown had initially prompted the counter-terrorism force at London's Metropolitan Police Force to conduct an investigation.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 03-22-2025 3PM EDT
However, suspicious causes for the fire have been ruled out, leaving UK lawmakers and ministers concerned about the resilience of Britain's critical infrastructure. For NPR News, I'm Willem Marks in London.
Up First from NPR
Global Economic Forecast Dims, Ukraine Peace Talks, Pope Francis Lies In State
Well, the talks will be hosted by the British Foreign Secretary, David Lamy. They'll include officials from the U.S., Ukraine, France, Germany. The most senior U.S. official attending now will be President Trump's envoy for Ukraine, retired General Keith Kellogg.
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Global Economic Forecast Dims, Ukraine Peace Talks, Pope Francis Lies In State
And really at the heart of these talks will be an attempt to knit together the sometimes kind of disparate European and American visions for how a peace roadmap could be built. The Europeans have, for the last couple of months, continued to really insist that support for Ukraine, whether that's military, political or economic,
Up First from NPR
Global Economic Forecast Dims, Ukraine Peace Talks, Pope Francis Lies In State
is going to be crucial to ensure that Russian President Vladimir Putin is forced to negotiate on more equal terms, shall we say. But members of the US administration have been briefing the media over the past few days that there are now options on the table, at least from their perspective. that would include the recognition by Ukraine of territory currently held by the invaders, Russia.
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Global Economic Forecast Dims, Ukraine Peace Talks, Pope Francis Lies In State
Okay, now how have Ukrainians responded to that? Well, not well, as you might imagine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly ruled out the possibility that Ukraine would, for instance, recognize, let's say, the Crimean Peninsula or parts of eastern Ukraine as Russian territory. Some of those were first annexed back in 2014.
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Global Economic Forecast Dims, Ukraine Peace Talks, Pope Francis Lies In State
But there have also been some pretty surprising recent statements out of Moscow, meanwhile, with President Putin saying on Russian state TV he'd always, quote, looked positively on any peace initiatives and he hoped Ukrainian leaders would do the same.
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Global Economic Forecast Dims, Ukraine Peace Talks, Pope Francis Lies In State
The Kremlin's chief spokesperson said those comments from the Russian president indicated a willingness to re-engage in direct talks with Ukraine about, at the very least, ending strikes on civilian targets. Okay, so then what's the United States' role in all of this? Well, you know, the absence of Secretary of State Rubio seems significant.
Up First from NPR
Global Economic Forecast Dims, Ukraine Peace Talks, Pope Francis Lies In State
Just last week in Paris, he'd said the Americans wanted discussions to move forward within days, otherwise there was a possibility the U.S. would move on. Steve Witkoff, the White House has said, will be travelling to Moscow, not to London this week, for a fourth face-to-face meeting with Putin.
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Global Economic Forecast Dims, Ukraine Peace Talks, Pope Francis Lies In State
And meanwhile, President Zelensky said that none of the potential ideas the US administration has been floating in the media have actually been formally shared with him or his team.
Up First from NPR
Global Economic Forecast Dims, Ukraine Peace Talks, Pope Francis Lies In State
And so it's kind of unclear whether the US is trying to stand between these two warring parties, as the mediator might, or instead to sort of create a peace framework, almost unilaterally, that Russia and Ukraine would be asked to simply accept.
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Global Economic Forecast Dims, Ukraine Peace Talks, Pope Francis Lies In State
Well, pretty obscure, frankly. President Putin's called the unilateral temporary ceasefire, you might remember, on Saturday evening for the entirety of the Easter weekend. But Britain's Defence Secretary John Healey told Parliament here in London yesterday that British military intelligence indicated there'd been no let up whatsoever in those attacks over the Easter weekend.
Up First from NPR
Global Economic Forecast Dims, Ukraine Peace Talks, Pope Francis Lies In State
The Ukrainians cried foul and said there had been no ceasefire from Russia. It had simply been a Russian propaganda exercise. All right, that's journalist Bill Marks in London. Thank you very much.
Up First from NPR
Mining's New Frontier
And there was this really poignant moment where this man, Jonathan Massillon, the anti-mining activist, he was really upset that this vessel was back in those nearby waters, he told me. It's essentially, he was saying, local people who will be the ones that suffer the consequences over the long term.
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Mining's New Frontier
Well, it's kind of a crazy story. It started out last year. I was working on a piece about the Titan. That's the submersible that kind of imploded close to the Titanic wreck. And as my reporting continued, I went to this small island off the south coast of the UK called Jersey. I met someone there who'd been involved through his company in efforts to rescue that submersible.
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Mining's New Frontier
Well, in some ways, this will depend on what this company involved decides to do. You know, if they think this is not going to make them money and therefore isn't worth it, they may walk away, but that seems unlikely. The government has a financial stake in this effort, and that's really important to be aware of.
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Mining's New Frontier
They invested money many years ago in this idea, and officials there are concerned about recouping that investment in a country that doesn't tend to have a huge amount of spare money. Elsewhere in the world where this has theoretically been given approval, countries like Norway, Japan, and the Cook Islands, things are moving really slowly.
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Mining's New Frontier
The effort in Norway has been tied up in litigation for many months. In Japan, they're moving really cautiously, looking at the science before moving ahead. And that will be essentially a Japanese state entity involved in that. And in the Cook Islands, they're still quite early on in terms of their analysis of whether this will be a good idea or not.
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Mining's New Frontier
Those are really the only places on Earth where this is being considered genuinely at the moment.
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Mining's New Frontier
Yes, you have these, you know, parts of the ocean worldwide that have these massive and rich amounts of rare minerals and metals. Some of them are like these deposits in Papua New Guinea. And then you have other types of deposits on the seafloor, these kind of nodules that sit around on the seafloor and can be relatively easily picked up.
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Mining's New Frontier
They're very rich in some of the minerals and rare metals that are of interest to companies worldwide. Until really recently, we didn't have the technology to reach some of these places that are, you know, Miles deep in places like the Pacific Ocean.
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Mining's New Frontier
But now because of the advent of these remote controlled vehicles, these incredibly strong winches that can move things like these grabbing devices down there, this is all becoming a lot more accessible.
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Mining's New Frontier
And over the course of the day talking, he mentioned something which he said at the time, you know, I probably shouldn't be talking to you about this. But it was that he was working on subsea underwater mining in Papua New Guinea. And so he and I stayed in touch. I was immediately interested in trying to understand what that looked like.
Up First from NPR
Mining's New Frontier
There are arguments for and against like many of these things. We need as a species to reduce carbon emissions, right? No one really questions that. And one way to do that is to transition the way that we generate and use energy into techniques that are less likely to emit carbon molecules into our atmosphere. And one way of doing that is using electric vehicles, let's say.
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Mining's New Frontier
They need huge amounts of material, more than we know we have on Earth right now. So if everyone's going to drive an electric car one day, let alone everyone in developing nations that don't even have cars yet, and I'm talking 30, 40, 50 years down the road, stuff, material, metals, minerals. If that is needed, where is it going to come from?
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Mining's New Frontier
But then you balance that with this idea that these activities could have huge damaging impacts on environments we don't really understand in the deep sea, and we don't really understand what those deep sea environments mean for our broader atmosphere, for instance. That really is concerning. This was a story again about powerful people and powerless people.
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Mining's New Frontier
You go to these local villages, those people don't feel they have a voice. They don't feel like they're being listened to. They don't feel like they're even being seen.
Up First from NPR
Mining's New Frontier
And then you have outside investors, outside engineers, outside companies operating over the horizon, doing work that's not being broadcast or published or talked about, and it's certainly not sharing their information with those local communities or even necessarily with all of the local government officials you end up having that, what I think of as an informational inequality.
Up First from NPR
Mining's New Frontier
It really does strike me as something that needs strong global coordination, particularly if we're going to move into international waters, deep sea mining. And part of that will obviously focus on ensuring that local communities benefit from this kind of activity if it does go ahead as much as some of the billionaires involved in it.
Up First from NPR
Mining's New Frontier
And a few months later, he said his vessel was heading out there. He said, if you want to join us, we'll be there for a few weeks, just figure out dates that work. And up to this point, you know, deep sea mining, just to take a step back, has been really pretty theoretical as far as people like me are aware.
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Mining's New Frontier
There's been a fair amount of exploratory work and kind of an effort to try and understand what the economics would look like. But that's often been done relatively quietly, relatively privately. And so of course I did want to join.
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Mining's New Frontier
And so I ended up booking flights going via Singapore from London onto the capital of Papua New Guinea, Port Moresby, then catching another local flight to another island, driving across that island for four hours or so, waiting on a beach in the middle of nowhere. And eventually after some time, this catamaran kind of belching smoke out the back appears over the horizon.
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Mining's New Frontier
It's kind of a local ferry. And it turns up to take me to the vessel.
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Mining's New Frontier
Well, it's 270 feet long. It towers above the water when you first board it. It's got several decks. And you've got a massive amount of machinery. You've got these winches, you've got cranes, a couple of these remotely operated vehicles, these kind of huge cuboid machines that go 6,000 meters deep if they need to.
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Mining's New Frontier
And they're all on the back of this massive deck, often moving around at times throughout the day, throughout the night. The vessel's a couple of hours away from the shore, as I mentioned, and it's really sticking in one place.
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Mining's New Frontier
the engines, the thrusters around the outside of the vessel are often firing at different moments to keep it to the millimeter almost in one position as they work several miles or at least a mile deep beneath them.
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Mining's New Frontier
So they're not doing full-scale long-term industrial mining. What they were doing this summer was essentially carving out chunks of the seabed beneath the vessel in dimensions 10 meters by 10 meters to kind of get a cross sectional analysis of the ore, the rock that they want to mine from at a much larger scale in the future.
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Mining's New Frontier
So they were digging out these huge chunks every single day and night, bringing some of them on deck, and then looking to see essentially how much metal was inside those sections and hoping that that would then translate into a similar level of metal concentration over a much larger area.
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Mining's New Frontier
Well, this is what was so surprising to me, because they told me they had permits to extract 180 tons of this rock from the seafloor for analysis, which will be carried out
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Mining's New Frontier
in laboratories in australia which is not that far away from papua new guinea but it's still a fair old haul and then probably five to ten times as much as they're bringing on deck they're digging up and then depositing just a few yards away in these kinds of stockpiles and i said well what are you guys doing that for and they said we hope that when we come back it'll make it much faster to mine it later on and since this device they're using to pull it up on deck goes up and down
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Mining's New Frontier
a mile or so each time, it makes sense to do a lot of it down at that depth while they're down there before yanking it up each time, which they did every 12 hours or so.
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Mining's New Frontier
Yeah, it's like that scene in Toy Story. Yeah. Exactly that. Where they're sending this down on this huge winch next to the claw, the grabbing device. They've then got this underwater vehicle. And that attaches itself onto the claw to help guide it. And so once they've maneuvered the claw into the position they want to grab some of the seafloor, it just yanks shut.
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Mining's New Frontier
And once they've got it securely fastened inside the jaws of that claw, that grabber, It goes up to the surface a mile above.
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Mining's New Frontier
It's a good question. And so, you know, we had a limited time on board. It's hard for me to talk about every single time this happened. But given that while we were there, This claw was coming up every 12 hours. They spent a lot of time making sure that the load inside the jaws of it were securely fastened before they moved it. But at least one occasion I saw that it hadn't fully locked closed.
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Mining's New Frontier
It's hard to see down there. It's dark. There's a lot of kind of silk swirling around. And by the time it got to the surface on one occasion, it was clear that the jaws hadn't locked and a lot of the stuff inside had fallen out on the way up to the surface.
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Mining's New Frontier
It is, and not just amongst climate activists, but also amongst many of the scientists who've looked at the feasibility of deep sea mining. And this has been an industry that's been studied for quite some time, even though it's not yet really taken off. There are two ways to sort of think about this. One is the disruption right on the surface.
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Mining's New Frontier
A huge grabbing device, like a giant metal claw, comes out of the water. It's travelled a mile up from the seabed. It's filled with tons of rock and silt, and yet you can see the jaws haven't really closed, and I suddenly realise, as I see the water dripping out, there are little bits of rock falling out as well, and it's been falling out all the way up on the journey.
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Mining's New Frontier
And in this kind of deposit, they're looking primarily for copper, bit of gold, bit of silver. The rock that forms the bed there of the sea floor is rich in these metals because essentially it's come out of the Earth's crust. And then the second concern is about what happens as this material travels to the surface.
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Mining's New Frontier
If you're working with a mile-deep ocean or a two-mile-deep ocean, or even deeper in some cases, there's the scale of that material falling out even gradually over that distance. And then once you have currents, it could potentially blanket large areas of the ocean floor elsewhere.
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Mining's New Frontier
And that has the potential, scientists say, to then choke marine life, whether that's coral or other forms of plants or animals.
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Mining's New Frontier
They had environmental scientists on board who every time they sent this device up and down from the surface to the seafloor, they would put out these devices and it allows them to test what's happening in the seawater at different depths beneath the ship. And the intention of these environmental scientists was to figure out exactly how damaging this may or may not be.
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Mining's New Frontier
So this will all be part of the kind of examination, the data analysis this company does, in theory, alongside regulators and government officials from Papua New Guinea to decide whether this is something that can move forward.
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Mining's New Frontier
Well, to be totally honest, I found it to be pretty messy. No one really seemed to know the fact that the vessel was there. I went looking back in the capital, Port Moresby, for some answers and a bit of a better understanding about how this entire industry was shaping up and being regulated in Papua New Guinea.
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Mining's New Frontier
I tried to chase down the head of the country's environment agency, but I eventually got hold of a man called Jerry Gary on Zoom. He runs the mining regulatory authority for Papua New Guinea, and he told me that any mining vessel that was operating in Papua New Guinea's territorial waters would definitely have officials from his agency on board to monitor what they're doing.
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Mining's New Frontier
And I pointed out, I'd just been on a vessel a couple of days earlier. None of his officials had been on board. And this is what he said.
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Mining's New Frontier
So right now, do you know that the vessel is in the country?
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Mining's New Frontier
And yet you're managing director of the Mineral Resources Authority.
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Mining's New Frontier
Now... companies, the investors involved in this, they say, well, of course he knew about it. All of the officials in Papua New Guinea know about what we're trying to do there. All of them have signed off on it. But he wasn't the only person who said they weren't aware of that vessel. I had a similar interaction with a man called Alan Bird, also in the capital city.
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Mining's New Frontier
He's the governor of one of the largest provinces in Papua New Guinea. He's been opposed for years to the idea of underwater mining. So I asked him about this permitting issue.
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Mining's New Frontier
You're a senior governor in this country. Yeah. And the fact that you don't know about that... How does that make you feel? Deeply worried.
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Mining's New Frontier
It kind of depends, right? So you've got people who have an obligation to regulate an industry like this, whether that's the environmental agency or the mining regulator, the fisheries authority. Really, none of them claimed to know anything about it or were willing to talk to me. And then you have people like Alan Bird and another senior governor I spoke to.
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Mining's New Frontier
And in Papua New Guinea, if you're the governor of a province, you're also a member of the country's parliament, at which point you're going to obviously have oversight into particularly controversial industries like this one. And the fact that these people who for years have publicly opposed the idea of deep sea mining are
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Mining's New Frontier
The idea that they say, well, they didn't know about it is in a sense not surprising. And the shock when I spoke to some of them about this was really very genuine from where I stood.
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Mining's New Frontier
Well, I guess what was really striking was, you know, you get off this vessel on this island in the middle of this ocean and And you've got these officials saying, oh, we didn't know it was happening. You've got senior members of the government in some cases, senior governors of other islands who've been very engaged in the subject saying, we didn't know about it.
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Mining's New Frontier
And you know, this in turn was pretty surprising to me because it showed that the company involved in this effort, you know, it may have been meeting with government officials, maybe the local governor, maybe the prime minister, but it doesn't seem to have really met with local people.
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Mining's New Frontier
the communities that maybe have the most to lose in terms of their livelihoods, particularly around fishing, being threatened, people that really rely on fishing just off a few yards from where they live on the coastline, the idea that their fish might be impacted by the industry was really surprising. You've got pretty powerful people involved in this particular effort as well.
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Mining's New Frontier
There's a Russian oligarch who's helped to finance this company, He currently is under EU and US sanctions after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. You've got another very powerful and wealthy mining magnate from a country called Oman in the Arabian Gulf.