Deep Sea Isopod wrote:Gold, silver, copper and zinc are all present in the mineral-rich emissions of the vent systems and recent advances in deep-sea oil exploration are giving miners the chance to exploit these areas for the first time.
There goes the neighbourhood.
Exactly. There's gold in them thar vents. Let the mad scramble commence! It's worth quoting the second half of the article:
By studying life around the hydrothermal vent systems, which are dotted along the deep sea mountain range that girdles the planet, the team hopes to increase the understanding of the way marine communities interact. This, in turn, could aid efforts to better protect endangered marine species.
Senior researcher Dr Alex Rogers, from the Zoological Society of London, said: "The densities of animals and the biomass of life around these hydrothermal vents is just staggering."
However, scientists will not have these extraordinary environments to themselves for long.
Gold, silver, copper and zinc are all present in the mineral-rich emissions of the vent systems and recent advances in deep-sea oil exploration are giving miners the chance to exploit these areas for the first time.
Nautilus Minerals, a small Canadian company backed by the giant mining company Anglo-American, has just received an environmental permit from the government of Papua New Guinea to conduct the world's first deep-sea mining in the vent fields of the Bismarck Sea.
Giant undersea excavators will be built this year, and ore could be rising from depths of 1,600m by 2012.
Conservation biologist Professor Rick Steiner, formerly of the University of Alaska, was called in to examine the company's original environmental impact assessment study.
He is concerned about the dumping of thousands of tonnes of rock on the seabed and about the danger of spillages of toxic residue, but his real objection is more fundamental.
He explained: "The site that they mine, they're going to destroy all these vent chimneys where the sulphide fluids come out."
He added that it could cause the extinction of species that are not even known to science yet.
"I think that, from an ethical stand-point, is unacceptable," he said.
Steven Rogers, CEO of Nautilus, said that he accepted that the mined area would be damaged, but said he was convinced that it could recover.
He believes deep-sea mining will be less damaging to the environment than mining on land.
He said: "I think there's a much greater moral question…. here we have an opportunity to provide those metals with a much, much lower impact on the environment."
The success of the Nautilus enterprise is dependent less on questions of morality than of profit.
Steven Rogers estimates that this first mining site could yield anything from tens of millions of dollars up to $300m in value.
But Professor Steiner believes that success in the Bismarck Sea will provoke a "goldrush" at vent systems around the world, most of which have yet to be properly studied.
'Crucial crossroad'
Dr Jon Copley is well aware of the moral and political questions being thrown up by the team's ground-breaking work.
He believes that we are at a crucial crossroads in the use of the deep ocean.
He can see a future where nation states squabble over natural resources, but he is optimistic that the international co-operation demonstrated on his current voyage will lead to sensitive study and sustainable exploitation of the deep sea's riches.
"Hopefully there's a different path forward if we've got the courage and determination to take it," he said.
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