If mining companies are given the go-ahead to exploit the ocean depths, the environmental cost will be devastating. As the clock ticks down to a crucial deadline in July, Michael Segalov reports
or almost 30 years, much of what went on at the secretive-sounding International Seabed Authority in Jamaica was unreported and scarcely noticed.
Regardless, due to a quirk in an ageing international treaty, deep-sea mining might happen in a matter of months after the pulling of a legal lever by a Canadian-owned company and the government of Nauru. Some believe the ISA’s members have been delivered a legitimate ultimatum: either agree the regulations for mining within two years or allow it to go ahead regardless. Others argue this is a worrying misinterpretation of the body’s ruling text. Either way, the clock runs out this July.
Deep-sea mining exploration and research has been ongoing since the 1960s, but nothing on an industrial scale has yet begun. Much of the technology it would require remains in development, or it’s privately owned and commercially sensitive, and out of the public domain. Regulations for mining are yet to be agreed upon.
Last year she co-authored a paper which found that across all the areas where mining exploration had started, only 1.1% of the science required to ascertain its impact had been done. We simply do not know enough. The deep sea, she accepts, might well feel distant. “But not only is it full of life,” she makes clear, “a biodiversity reservoir, with two thirds of the species that live there still undiscovered, it’s also essential to the planet being habitable.
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