Deep-sea mining: The next frontier for critical minerals
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What is deep sea mining and why is it gaining interest?
Hello, everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us. Today, we're getting smarter about deep sea mining because a lot of change is happening in this fledgling industry. And many, including President Trump, say that it has a lot of potential to boost not only the U.S. economy, but also national security. My colleague Daniel Ackerman is our resident deep sea mining expert. He's reported a bunch of stories from Marketplace on the ocean mining industry, and he writes a newsletter on this topic called Seabed Spotlight. He's here to help us out with Deep Sea Mining 101. Dan, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks, Kimberly. So to get us started, what is exactly deep sea mining and why are people so interested in this?
Well, most of the mined materials that we use in our cars and smartphones, you know, come from land. It comes from the rocks and the dirt beneath our feet. And mining all that stuff can often mean bad things like displacing communities to make an open pit mine or... cutting down a rainforest to get at the materials underneath it. So deep sea mining is this idea that maybe we can avoid some of these problems by getting these metals from the bottom of the ocean in a remote area that's far from where anyone lives, that doesn't touch anyone's drinking water, not near a rainforest. And, you know, there really is a lot of metal down there at the bottom of the ocean that the U.S. Geological Survey has estimated that there is more nickel, cobalt, and manganese in just one patch of the eastern Pacific Ocean than in all of the known terrestrial reserves of those metals combined.
So there is kind of a big opportunity here to get a lot of metal from remote parts of the deep ocean. How deep are we talking about and why is there so much metal down there? Yeah, so this is, it almost feels like another world to describe it. This can be under multiple miles of seawater down where there's no sunlight penetration, so it's totally dark. It is frigid temperatures, really high pressures. And the types of deposits down there, and I'm going to warn you, I'm going to nerd out on geology here for just a minute. The types of deposits that are of most interest to mining companies are these very strange rocks called polymetallic nodules. And these, I call them strange because they don't form like other rocks.
They're not, you know, formed deep within the bowels of the earth. They actually form right on top of the seabed, on the sandy, you know, seabed surface. And they grow over time. So what happened is, you know, let's go back 10 million years. A shark is swimming through the ocean and it loses a tooth. That tooth falls to the bottom of the ocean onto the seabed. And that organic matter, that tooth acts as kind of like a nucleus where over time, little molecules of metal that are in trace amounts in the seawater start sticking to that tooth. And then over the course of millions of years, molecule by molecule, you know, this metal gloms on and turns into a polymetallic nodule that that is kind of like the size and shape of a potato.
And now humans see these potatoes and think, hey, we could use these in our technology. That is absolutely wild. How many of these are down there? trillions so there are there are some parts of of the deep sea like that that area in the eastern pacific ocean that i mentioned where you know if you send a camera down there it almost looks like a cobblestone street there are just so many of these nodules packed so tightly together um and and again like these are really large deposits of metal bigger than anything that um we've found on land So cameras have been down there, but as far as we know, no countries or companies have actually mined the deep sea yet. What's the holdup if all this is down there for the taking?
Well, there's technology, economics, ethics, international law. I don't know. Where do you want to start here?
What are polymetallic nodules and why are they valuable?
So, I mean, back in the 1960s and 70s, so actually decades ago, there was quite a flurry of interest in deep sea mining.
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