Deep-sea mining is unregulated. Some want to forge ahead anyway

0:00This is a story about the pen of a president and potato-sized rocks that begins in the deep sea. The deep sea contains a lot of metal, especially in this one area, the Clarion-Clipperton zone. This is an area that stretches from Hawaii to about Mexico in international waters, so an enormous ocean space. Diva Amen is a Caribbean marine biologist, and she is worried about the fact that this pristine environment has caught the attention of commercial industries, because this area contains billions of tons of what are known as polymetallic nodules. There are these cherry to potato size lumps of metal, if you will, that sit on top of the sediment.

0:43That also contains something the electric vehicle and other industries want, rare earth minerals like nickel and cobalt. Gerard Barron, the CEO of the Canadian startup The Metals Company, wants to be the first to mine these nodules for commercial use. Barron spoke to reporter Daniel Ackerman for NPR earlier this year. They literally sit there like golf balls on a driving range. We can pick those nodules up and turn them into metals at a fraction of the environmental and human impacts compared to land-based mining. But is that true? Is deep-sea mining really that harmless? The Trump administration thinks so.

1:22In April, President Trump gave companies like the Metals Company an opening. He signed an executive order to fast-track deep-sea mining in both federal and international waters, which includes the Clarion-Clipperton zone. But Eamon, the biologist you heard earlier, says this puts the U.S. at odds with nearly every other country in the world, as they wait for the U.N.'s International Seabed Authority to finalize regulations for everyone. This is unprecedented and really goes against what more than 100 states have been working towards at the International Seabed Authority and really ultimately goes against multilateralism.

1:59Consider this. In the power struggle over who can mine the deep sea, what's at stake for the stability of the planet and a vital zone of the ocean?

2:14From NPR, I'm Emily Kwong.

2:23It's Consider This from NPR. The Trump administration announced this past week that it has entered talks with the Cook Islands to research and develop seabed mineral resources. The Polynesian archipelago is one of only a handful of countries worldwide that has begun permitting this type of exploration called deep sea mining. Now, deep-sea mining is not regulated. There's no blueprint for how to do it safely nor responsibly, which is why, for the last decade, the UN's International Seabed Authority has worked to draw up regulations. But President Trump and one Canadian company have posed a question.

2:59Why wait? Here to tell us more is Beth Orcutt. She's an oceanographer and the vice president for research at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in East Booth Bay, Maine. Beth, welcome. Thank you for having me. I want to start by descending in an imaginary submarine to travel to the deep sea. Where is this part of the ocean? What does it look like and what lives there? The deep sea is a fascinating place to get to explore. I feel so lucky to have been able to go down to the deep sea and other parts of the Pacific Ocean. When you first get in the submarine or use a robot. You go through the sunlit ocean.

3:40You see fish, you see sharks, you see stuff like that. But then you start to descend into the twilight zone and then into the part of the ocean that becomes completely dark. No sunlight gets down there. And you start seeing life that communicates with light. They flash bioluminescence at each other to either attract prey or warn off things. And then eventually you reach the bottom and it feels, I think, like going to another planet might feel like. It's a totally crazy, exciting world full of interesting animals and interesting processes. I mean, really, it's stuff that sci-fi is built from. So the International Seabed Authority does not have a permitting process for mining in international waters yet.

4:28They keep saying they're going to create one. They keep pushing back the deadline, wanting more science to be done before really defining those regulations. And the company at the center of this debate, the metals companies, basically said, look, we're tired of waiting. CEO Gerard Barron defends applying for a U.S. permit. What do you make of the U.S. striking out alone like this as a scientist who studies the deep sea? Yeah, so as a scientist, the The concerns I've raised at the International Seabed Authority and that I also would raise in this context if the U.S. pursues this is that all actors need to ensure the effective protection of the marine environment.

5:09Knowing that we're effectively protecting it requires having good scientific information in terms of what's the natural variability of the systems, how do they function, how do they respond to perturbation, can you fix it if you mess it up. And right now, we don't have good information to answer those questions. And so it makes our ability to ensure effective protection very difficult, no matter who is the regulator, whether it's the United States or the international body. And importantly, there are different steps. There's the exploration stage and then the exploitation stage. And between those two, companies should do what's called test mining and, you know, look at the environmental impact of those tests.

5:54Has anything been revealed from your research on how microscopic life in the deep sea thrives in this very dark, very extreme environment and how deep sea mining might impact that life? There is a lot of scientific information from not just me, but many of my colleagues. So some of the most well-known work has looked at sites that had nodules. The nodules were removed kind of like by dredging them out of the way. And another team of scientists went back decades later. And not only had animals not come back to those environments, especially the animals that attach to rocks, But even the microbes that can grow much faster were still not there.

6:37They were still much lower in concentration, and the processes that they perform were still lower. And so the available data suggests that it will take decades, if not centuries, if even longer, for the nodules and the animals that live on nodules to be able to recover once mining takes place. Mm. These nodules are, of course, small rock-like lumps on the ocean floor that contain the minerals that are wanted for these products, yeah? Correct, yeah. So these are kind of like potato-sized black pieces of rock. They're mostly manganese oxide, but they co-precipitate other metals, and that's what the interest is in those nodules, is the other metals that are co-precipitated.

7:21Why does it matter that in these test mining sites the animals aren't coming back? So most of the animals in those environments attach to the rocks. Those are things like deep-sea corals, sponges, deep-sea anemone. And they provide habitat for all other kinds of life. And there are animals that dive to the depths of the ocean to get food. So they're performing very essential services to supporting those ecosystems. There are also potentially reservoirs of genetic discovery. Right now, there are new drugs and new biotech products that are being created from marine sponges and other marine organisms.

8:04And we're just tapping the surface of what the genetic diversity is in the deep sea. So there could potentially be new solutions that come from the diversity of life that's down there. Yeah. I mean, the deep sea is such a mysterious place in a lot of respects. scientists have mapped less than 25 percent of the deep sea floor i believe um and just just like you're saying new discoveries are being made all the time and you're making me think about some research that an international team led by andrew sweetman discovered recently that those nodules these lumps on the ocean floor that they at least in the area that he was studying were producing oxygen no photosynthesis required and they called it dark oxygen what do you make of the discovery of dark oxygen within these nodules, and why is that important to the conversation around deep sea mining and pulling them up?

8:57Yeah, the recent discovery that there may be oxygen production on nodule surfaces is really interesting in first showing what we maybe don't know about how these ecosystems function, and that there's whole new processes that might be occurring down in the deep sea that we haven't seen before. If that process is occurring and there needs to be more research to really document it, that means that there could be extra energy sources for microbes that live in those environments. That might also mean that they're giving off different chemical cues to the animals to figure out, hey, come sit here on this nodule.

9:37Maybe, we don't know. And so it highlights that we still have more to understand about how these deep, dark, high pressure, low temperature ecosystems function. And while it may be mysterious to us, it's important to remember that this is the majority of the Earth, right? The oceans cover so much of our planet, which means so much of our planet is the deep sea. And so if we don't even know these very basic questions, we really just have so much to discover. Beth Orkut is an oceanographer and the vice president for research at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in East Booth Bay, Maine. Thanks so much, Beth.

10:17Thank you so much. For more ocean science, check out Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR, and especially our new series, Sea Camp. This episode was produced by Katherine Fink. It was edited by Tinbeet Ermias. Our executive producer is Sammy Yannigan.

10:38It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Emily Kwong.