(subtle music) (water bubbling)
- [Cory] There's a conflict brewing
at the bottom of the ocean.
In the coming decade, it will play out thousands of feet
down in deep dark expanses of sea floor.
On one side of the battle are unique
and alien like creatures: giant tube worms, yeti crabs,
dandelion like jellyfish colonies
and on the other side, bizarrely,
our cell phones, TV's, wind turbines, modern technology.
In a real way, those two interests
may end up fighting over one of the most mysterious
and dramatic environments on earth, this one.
Okay, so this is clearly a model.
We don't have a submarine so we built this instead.
You know what I just realized?
There are no plants down there.
They don't exist.
Thanks to modern electronics, there's an overwhelming demand
for some very particular chemical elements.
Gold is used constantly in computer circuitry.
Nickel, Manganese, Zinc and Cobalt are needed for batteries
and Copper is crucial to countless kinds of wiring.
Worldwide, humans mined around 20 million tonnes of Copper
in 2017 and those are just a few examples.
The point is elements like these power the modern world.
Many of these precious metals are sourced
from massive terrestrial mines
but while we chip away at our reserves on land,
some entrepreneurs have been gaming out
a very different source of precious minerals.
In the deep dark of the sea floor,
10 or even 15 thousand feet down
shifting tectonic plates create fissures
in the Earth's crust and allow hot magma
to seep close to the sea bed.
If the conditions are just right,
sea water percolates through the crust,
becomes a super heated mineral rich fluid
and shoots back into the ocean.
These sites are called hydrothermal vents
and for the few people who have actually seen them
in person, they are almost beyond words.
- It's hard to describe what it's like to
go down in a submersible which I've done
a fair number of times and you're arriving on the bottom
and you're at this mid ocean ridge
where there's brand new rock that's been formed.
It's basalt, it's black and it's mostly
not much living on it at all.
- Dr. Verena Tunnicliffe is a professor
and former sea floor adventurer
at the University of Victoria.
- You're driving along and all of a sudden,
you come into a hydrothermal vent
and there is just going from black nothing to all of this
white microbial production and all of the animals around it.
Temperatures up to 400 degrees centigrade
so you've got these big chimneys
that are formed from the minerals
and it's just covered with life.
- The first critters to take up
shop here are chemosynthetic microbes.
Amazingly, they derive energy from chemical reactions,
not the sun and they love the vents.
- So you've got lots of microbes
that are producing like mad, it's food.
Now you've got lots of animals then coming in
because there's food and therefore,
lots and lots of animals that want to eat that food.
- Researchers estimate that there may be
600 larger active vents sprinkled along mid-ocean ridges
and each one can support its own unique vibrant ecosystem.
Researchers like Verena have cataloged new species
of sea cucumbers, foot long white clams, squid worms.
For biologists, it's an embarrassment of riches.
- Frankly, it's very easy to find new species
at hot vents and I have lost track.
I know that we've done at least a hundred through the lab.
- But in addition to life, there are minerals.
As water passes through these systems,
a complex set of chemical reactions
leach minerals out of the rock.
When the fluids spew back out into the cold sea water,
the minerals separate out again littering the sea floor
with Gold, Copper, Zinc, Manganese and more.
There is a theoretical fortune to be made down here
and that hasn't been ignored.
In 2017, Japan announced that it had completed a landmark
trial mining operation near the island of Okinawa.
The mining site was an inactive vent meaning that
it was no longer spewing out hydrothermal fluid.
It was really just baby steps towards full scale mining
but it spooked conservationists
because mining a hydrothermal vent
really means destroying it.
- So they have to go in, they have to cut out the rock
and then they have to grind it up into a slurry
and the slurry is pumped to the surface.
So the habitat is destroyed, the animals are gone,
the habitat is converted from big chimneys
with lots of niches into mud.
- In some cases, vents are naturally resilient.
Those that form in volcanically active areas
are constantly destroyed and reformed
and the animals there have adapted to that volatility.
Verena likened them to new growth forests
that bounce back quickly after wild fires.
But the sites most valuable for miners
are mature stable vents.
The minerals there built up over thousands of years.
- The rocks that are deposited by the vents
have taken thousands to tens of thousands
and even more years to deposit and form.
Those habitats are very stable
so those are your old growth forms.
- The animals there aren't adapted to catastrophic disruption
and could be wiped out by mining.
For all that, vents are probably not in imminent danger.
First, if sea floor mining really kicks into high gear,
it likely will not start with hydrothermal vents.
There are other valuable sources of minerals in the ocean.
Many are found within rocky lumpy masses called nodules.
Those are scattered across wide flat plains on the sea floor
and they may prove easier and cheaper to harvest
which is the bottom line of any mining effort.
- Financing, financing, financing.
Deep sea mining is going to be expensive.
And that's one of the lessons of the Japanese experiment
is that "boy, this is hard."
- Conn Nugent is the director of the
Pew seabed mining project.
It's a group that advocates from regulation
and conservation of the seafloor.
As scary as active vent mining sounds,
he suspects that it may end up being
more trouble than it's worth.
- It would be really hard to conduct exploitation
in an active zone because it's so darn hot.
You'd have to devise machineries and delivery system's
and riser systems to withstand scalding temperatures.
- The hope is that regulation will come into effect
before seabed mining of any kind becomes affordable.
The International Seabed authority is a governing body
that spun out of the United Nations
and it's working to get a "mining code" enacted by 2020.
In the meantime, concerned scientists have come forward
to propose criteria for creating "no-mining" zones.
For Conn, this would be historic.
- Really, this is the first opportunity
in which regulations can be written
to govern exploitation activity before it begins.
You know, can you imagine if in 1859,
there were oil drilling regs?
(chuckles)
It might have been helpful, you know.
We had to go through quite a bit of trial and error
and we're still going through quite a bit
of trial and error in governing that.
- The demand for the minerals that power electronics
isn't going anywhere and ignoring deep sea mining
would mean committing more fully to terrestrial mines.
We know what that looks like and it isn't pretty.
So, some amount of seabed mining
might make sense in the future.
- Go look at a pit mine.
Go look and see how Cobalt is removed
from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
So, that's the green argument
for deep sea mining and it has validity.
- But when it comes to active sea vents,
there's so much left to learn and study.
So, even if they're safe for now,
advocates like Conn and Verena
would like them to stay that way.
- So now is the time to write protections
and a key protection is no mining ever in active vent zones.
That's the barroom brawl that we're willing to enter into.
(water gurgling)
- This is all they had. (chuckles)
(water splashing)