Deep, deep down on the floor of the world's oceans, rare and precious minerals exist in abundance. Mining companies have long had their eyes on this treasure but haven't had the technology to access it. Now they do and the race to mine the sea floor seems poised to begin. Today on The Sunday Story, we head to the Bismarck Sea off the coast of Papua New Guinea. It's here that a massive mining ship was recently hauling up chunks of the sea floor from a mile down, trying to gauge the mineral wealth and the possible damage extraction might cause.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What is the main story about deep sea mining?
I'm Ayesha Roscoe. This is the Sunday Story from Up First, where we go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story. Today, we're going really deep, and I mean really deep, basically to the bottom of the ocean. There's been a lot of attention lately on a new mineral frontier in the dark depths of the sea.
More and more commercial mining interests have their eyes on the seabed floor as an untapped source of minerals essential to powering our green energy future. So far, very few companies have been granted rights to mine the seafloor. But recently, Villa Marks, a reporter in the UK, was invited to witness one of the mining operations in action.
Here he is describing a moment standing on the stern of a huge mining vessel as it brought up a massive chunk of ocean floor.
Chapter 2: What did Willem Marks witness on the mining vessel?
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.
Willem Marks joins me now. Welcome to the podcast.
Hey, Aisha.
So, Willem, given the sensitivities around sea mining, I have to wonder, like, how did you get this front row seat on an exploratory mining vessel?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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Chapter 3: What are the environmental concerns of seabed mining?
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.
Okay, so what's your take on this? Like, what's going on?
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.
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
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.
I mean, so here we've got a developing nation. As an outsider, it seems like this is that story that's often told of really exploitation, a resource grab from these, you know, foreign companies coming in and just trying to get materials and wealth. Is that what it looked like to you?
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.
You then go to nearby villages on the nearest island to where the mining operations are taking place. And people there had no idea that just over the horizon, kind of 20 miles south of where we were sitting, talking... There's a vessel that's taking the first steps in starting deep sea mining operations. And when they found out about this from us, they really were not happy.
You know, people are surprised. They're shocked. This is Jonathan Masulam. He's a former teacher. He spent years trying to stop mining from happening off the coast of Papua New Guinea, and particularly this island, New Ireland. Masulam helped fight against a previous incarnation of this deep sea mining venture. And he and the communities he worked with along the island thought they'd
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