Mining the Ocean Floor: Good Idea? - Bloomberg View
▻http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-08-14/mining-the-ocean-floor-good-idea
While commodities traders still work their way out of a historic slump, Japan is looking ahead to the next boom. According to Bloomberg News, next year a group of Japanese companies and government agencies will start mining minerals at a site 1,000 miles southwest of Tokyo — and one mile beneath the ocean’s surface. It will be the first large-scale test of whether mineral deposits can be mined commercially from the seafloor.
The project is fairly bold. The seafloor is home to priceless deposits of minerals such as gold, copper and cobalt. And thanks to new technologies, it might soon be exploitable. That’s potentially good news for miners and commodity speculators. But it poses some alarming challenges for the marine environment — and the economies that depend on it.
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Exploration isn’t disruptive to the environment. But seabed mining will be. For one thing, it requires underwater harvesters that will suck up those valuable rocks — and any organisms or habitats that get in the way. Some will recover, but others never will: Nodules, which support an abundance of organisms, require millions of years to form. Even worse, the harvesters will kick up huge sediment clouds that could spread over vast areas of the seabed, potentially ravaging corals and sponges.
These disruptions might even ricochet through the aquatic food chain. Last year, New Zealand denied a permit to mine the seabed off its coast after the seafood industry argued that it could deposit 45 million tons of sediment into its fisheries each year — fisheries that help feed people around world.