THOMAS PEACOCK: There's a classic
saying that if you can't grow it, you have to mine it.
I think the question of deep seabed mining
is part of a bigger question about how
the world is going to sustain itself in the next 10, 20, 30,
40 years.
We want electric powered vehicles.
We want solar cells for clean energy.
But all this requires resources.
Land-based resources are getting depleted
or more challenging to access.
In parts of the ocean, there are much more of these minerals
than in land-based reserves.
The question is can we do a better job in the ocean
than we do on land?
The specific purpose of this PLUMEX experiment
was to create a plume that used actual sediment
from the deep Pacific Ocean where
the mining's going to take place to monitor and track
that plume.
The goal is to understand if a sediment plume is released
from a surface mining vessel how far
and in what concentration will that sediment travel.
We can use that information to then determine how that
will impact the ocean biology.
There are three types of mining that
can take place in the ocean--
seafloor massive sulfides, which are hydrothermal vents.
There's cobalt crusts, which are the top of sea mats.
And there's polymetallic nodules,
which are these fist-sized rocks that lie
strewn across the deep ocean.
Out of the three possible resources in the deep ocean,
really the nodules are the one that have garnered the most
attention.
So that's the technology that we expect to be pushed most
in the coming five to 10 years.
The basic picture of a deep sea mining operation,
more specifically a nodule mining operation,
will involve a surface operation vessel.
From that, will be deployed a collector vehicle that
will be down and 4,000 meters, and it'll
be tethered to the surface operation vessel.
Mining of nodules will produce two different types of plumes.
One is a sediment plume created by the vehicle,
removing the top 10 to 15 centimeters of the seabed.
We call that a collective plume.
It will drive around and pick up the nodules,
and they'll be pumped back up a riser pipe
to the surface vessel.
And the second type of plume is a discharge plume,
which is unwanted sediment that is brought up
to the surface vessel.
This unwanted, unneeded and so would be returned to the ocean.
The question is whether that's returned
as a plume in the mid-water column or back down
in the deep ocean.
It's a tough thing to track a plume in the ocean.
At the start, it was really nerve racking.
The first two three tries, we didn't see anything,
so that builds up the tension.
MATTHEW ALFORD: We have probably about 9,000 gallons times
about 10 into the sea, so we're really,
really pumping a tremendous amount of sedimenty dyed
water into the sea.
And there's where you just appreciate
the vast scale of the sea.
It's amazing how fast you just lose it
like a needle in a haystack.
[APPLAUSE]
[INAUDIBLE]
THOMAS PEACOCK: MIT has observer status
with the ISA, which is the International Seabed Authority.
That's the agency set up by the United Nations
to govern the resources of the deep seabed.
CHRIS BROWN: In the 1970s and then ultimately 1980s,
the international community came together to negotiate a treaty.
This culminated in the United Nations Convention
on the Law of the Sea.
This was largely driven by the new economic order and also
a need to ensure that the ocean's resources were
shared fairly and equitably.
PRESIDENT: I therefore declared the convention package adopted.
[APPLAUSE]
CHRIS BROWN: This law of the sea basically determined
that the seabed and the subsoil and the resources
of the deep ocean beyond areas of national jurisdiction
belong to all of mankind.
The main areas of focus or our contractor base at the moment
is in the Clarion-Clipperton zone.
On the floor of the Abyssal Plain
sit these metallic nodules.
So that's where there is increased interest
and has been for many decades.
Back in the '70s, MIT was heavily
involved at the Law of the Sea conferences.
The work has now come full circle and is back at MIT.
The plume researches is very important and MIT
also helping with the experimentation
and developing plume models.
REPRESENTATIVE: We have we have sediment from CCZ
that we'll be using to create our [INAUDIBLE]..
CHRIS BROWN: It's very important that our research connects
to the needs of the ISA because that's
how we'll make the most impact.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
MATTHEW ALFORD: How strong are the currents?
I've been coming to see for a long time,
and I know that making measurements at sea
are always harder than you think because the ocean has
a habit of doing things that are unpredictable.
This was surprising in a not so fun way for the first five
days.
I think it all--
I think it just caught us off guard how hard it was
to do what we set out to do.
So the key question is if we decide
to make a plume at site A, how far
does it spread before eventually raining down on the seafloor?
And so that ability to map the geography
of the impact of seafloor mining is a crucial unknown right now.
THOMAS PEACOCK: We've run a plume using clay.
All stop.
VOICE (ON RADIO): All stop.
THOMAS PEACOCK: [INAUDIBLE] just jumped.
Yeah.
Ooh.
[INAUDIBLE]
And we'd landed-- we landed right on top of it.
We actually saw the plume for the first time.
We put dirt in the ocean and [INAUDIBLE]
And that I thought then was like we've got it.
Well, after many days of trying, we finally
managed to hit our plume.
Hopefully it's a home run.
Don't count your chickens too soon.
It's pretty good.
So we're going to go back for more now.
Hopefully there's another plume still waiting for us there.
And we went out, and we put the cage back in the water.
And it was gone.
We'd lost it.
Bummer.
Gone.
It was gone.
I think you find yourself in a situation where you say, well,
there's two ways I can go here.
You can let it defeat you, or you can rise to the challenge.
Whether mining the deep sea will be better or worse
for the planet as a whole than mining on land,
that's a really big question that we want to answer.
MATTHEW ALFORD: Just like any kind
of activity harvesting resources from the earth,
there are environmental impacts.
We always have to weigh carefully
what the relative gains and losses are.
A lot of time that happens retroactively.
We do the thing, and we figure out how badly we screwed up.
With deep seabed mining, we had the opportunity
to actually do a bit of science beforehand,
and that's an exciting opportunity because really it's
just in its infancy.
PRESENTER: Good morning, everyone.
Welcome to Cambridge.
Thank you everyone for making the time
to be here for this two-day workshop
entitled Solving Risks.
CINDY VAN DOVER: So the manganese nodules
occur in very deep water, 4,000, 5,000 meters of water depth.
Different kinds of animals live at that depth.
The biomass of the animals in the sediment is very low,
but the diversity is very high.
RESEARCHER 1: That is the craziest looking thing.
RESEARCHER 2: Yeah, this is the weird life.
This is very cool.
CINDY VAN DOVER: It's amazing how little
we know about the ocean.
This diversity of life tells us if we
might find unusual taxa that give us
some information about the evolution of different groups
of animals, maybe even some surprising groups of animals
that we've never seen before.
The idea of seabed mining in the nodule environment
is that there'll be a mining tool on the sea floor
that picks up the nodules themselves.
There'll be a plume.
That plume is going to get other organisms in the water column
and on the seabed.
So it could have clogging of filter feeding
structures, gelatinous organisms in the water column.
There could be burial of organisms on the sediment.
There may be some metals that get into the water column,
so there's concerns about toxicology.
One of the exciting things about deep sea mining
is that we don't know things, and so it's
a chance to find out.
RESEARCHER 2: I am sure that this is a [INAUDIBLE]..
And I am sure this is the first time a fish in this family
has ever been seen alive.
CHRIS BROWN: Nodules have an interesting aspect
to their makeup.
They actually contain four different minerals-- copper,
nickel, cobalt, and manganese.
And if you're mining something that
has four different minerals, then that
gives you a certain amount of safety room and flexibility
in terms of how financially stable
your operation actually is.
RICHARD ROTH: All four minerals in the nodule
are crucial to our society, and these are largely
for battery electric vehicles.
But everyone's concerned is about the increase in specialty
nickels that would go into energy storage,
and they're particularly concerned about the cobalt.
When we talk about land-based mining, it's not like a mine
anywhere I want.
I have to mine where the material is,
and where the cobalt is or where we
know about it largely is in the copper
belt of the southern Congo.
The Democratic Republic of Congo has challenges politically,
economically in terms of infrastructure.
And then, of course, there is the ever present threat
that some political disruption will cause a problem
with getting the material and that
will leave the companies that are
dependent on the material at a shortage
and could disrupt larger manufacturing system.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
THOMAS PEACOCK: On the next day, we
had actual CCZ sediment in there.
There's a lot of pressure on.
We only had one shot at that.
And, yeah, when we put that, the CTD, down for the first time
and we didn't see the plume--
It drifted.
It could be someone here.
RESEARCHER 1: Yeah.
THOMAS PEACOCK: It was tough.
Do you have any thoughts apart from where is this plume?
You could sense that everyone around was quiet.
I'm trying to stick to the plan.
We had 45 minutes.
It's just-- I don't think it's going
to make much difference to the overall experiment.
I guess we're seeing a bit of the blob
there-- there in the bottom.
We knew that we were near the plume.
We had a plan.
We knew what direction the ocean currents were going.
So I think we still felt in our hearts
that there was a 25% chance, 30% chance that it was there.
RESEARCHER 2: Do you want to keep moving in this direction?
THOMAS PEACOCK: And then--
RESEARCHER 1: Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, we got something.
We got something.
RESEARCHER 3: We got something.
RESEARCHER 1: Oh, yeah.
There it is.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
THOMAS PEACOCK: So now do we want to--
what do we want to do?
Do we want to keep on cutting through it?
I'm not sure who the happiest person was in the room
when we actually hit it.
RESEARCHER 1: I think we should stop--
RESEARCHER 3: Oh, wait, we got more.
We got more.
We got a big signal.
THOMAS PEACOCK: OK, good.
We're coming--
Yes, yeah.
There it is.
This makes sense.
It was nearby, we went in the right direction,
and we found it there.
It just kind of dawned on me that it's
like, we know how to track plumes now.
This is how we do it.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
You could see the joy and exuberance on everyone's face.
[INAUDIBLE]
RESEARCHER 1: Whatever floats your boat, man.
[LAUGHTER]
The experiment that really, really had to work worked.
Deep sea mining has a lot of unknowns.
There's the technology of how we're
going to go down to the deep ocean and gather these nodules.
There's the environmental unknowns.
For sure, there's going to be consequences.
The deep ocean seabed will be disturbed.
Biology there will be impacted.
It's quite easy to immediately portray it
in a very, very bad light.
But people have to also think about the equivalent
impact of mining in land.
If we're not going to get it from the ocean,
then the impact is going to be on land.
If we're going to have these technologies,
we have to find these resources from somewhere,
and we have to do it in the most responsible manner possible.
On the basis of what we learn, an informed decision
can be made.
We can get ourselves to a point where
we can say is this something we should do or not.