The sales pitch from deepsea mining interests is that extracting critical minerals from the seabed will help negate potential shortages, reduce what they describe as the demonstrably worse impacts of terrestrial mining, and cut greenhouse gas emissions. Critics, however, have a potent counter-argument: the almost complete lack of knowledge of seabed ecosystems means an inability to predict impacts to marine life reliant on nodules, seamounts and vent structures — most of which is still unknown to science. A recent meta-study that analyzed DNA from almost 1,700 sediment samples collected globally revealed deep-seabed biodiversity up to three times that of the waters above it, with 60 per cent of total organisms previously unknown lifeforms. Some of these creatures may function within the biological carbon pump — the life-driven sequestration of carbon to the ocean interior and seafloor that helps regulate climate.
While it’s acknowledged on both sides that the direct impact of massive robotic mining vehicles vacuuming up nodules, grinding down vents and stripping seamount crusts will result in 100 per cent mortality for organisms on those structures (in one impact study, an area test-mined in 1978 still hadn’t recovered after 37 years), the extent to which sediment plumes stirred by these activities will also damage habitats, interfere with nutrient cycling and cause oxygen depletion over wider areas is hotly debated. “Most of the fluid circulation that creates mineral deposits is adjacent to seamounts, so that’s where the mining opportunities are,” says Rachel Lauer. “But the idea that ‘what happens there stays there’ is ludicrous to oceanographers.”
Opponents of deepsea mining — whose lengthy list includes conservationists, scientists, oceanographers, nation states, Indigenous Peoples and civil society — have called for a ban, or at least postponement until impacts are better understood and regulations put in place by the UN-backed International Seabed Authority. Though some 22 countries have now called for a precautionary pause (Canada took a strong moratorium position in July 2023), a pause seems unlikely given that the International Seabed Authority’s mandate requires it to ultimately be financed by royalties from mining contracts — 31 of which have already been granted for exploratory purposes. So, the fact that the authority’s very existence depends on deepsea mining appears to conflict with its other mandated obligation to protect the marine environment.
Which brings us to the very visible campaign by The Metals Company, the Vancouver-based holder of three International Seabed Authority exploration permits located in the mid-Pacific’s Clarion-Clipperton Zone sponsored, one each, by the Pacific nations of Tonga, Nauru and Kiribati. The company’s website shills deepsea mining as humankind’s existential saviour from the climate crisis — and economic salvation for sponsoring nations. Greenwashing a clearly impactive resource industry isn’t new but has perhaps never been as cleverly crafted — nor so fortuitously enabled, given an emerging real-world demand for EVs and renewable energy.
While The Metals Company is funding, to the tune of $100 million, a range of basic research it claims as “independent,” we have seen this before. Conducted independently or not, there’s always the danger of research designed to deliver the answers you want, echoing the policy-based science making versus science-based policymaking practised by governments and industries like Big Tobacco, Big Oil, Big Fish, etc.