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
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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.
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.
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