A veritable gold rush appears to be opening up, not in the dusty hills of California but in the deep seabeds of the Pacific Ocean — one that’s being driven by an insatiable global demand of critical minerals that power our electric cars, smartphones, computer chips and more. While manganese, nickel, cobalt and other critical minerals are currently being mined on land, they could also be extracted by mining seabeds in locations like Gulf of Alaska seamounts or near the U.S. territories of American Samoa and the Mariana Islands.
Last April, President Trump issued an executive order directing federal agencies to fast-track the review and issuing of exploration licenses and commercial recovery permits for seabed minerals.
The Metals Company, based in Canada, has applied for an exploration license and commercial recovery permit in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a massive band of the Pacific Ocean stretching between Hawaii and Mexico that is thought to be rich in deposits of critical minerals. Last May, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management approved a request from California-based Impossible Metals to begin a leasing process to look for deep-sea minerals off the coast of American Samoa.
Despite these companies’ claims that deep-sea mining is a more ethical and environmental alternative to terrestrial mining, it is rife with uncertainty and poses grave risks to the health and biodiversity of the deep ocean, according to Astrid Leitner, an oceanographer and assistant professor in the College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University. She joins us to share more details, including the research she has done on deep sea ecosystems in areas the Trump administration is now interested in opening up to mining.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. A new kind of gold rush appears to be opening up, not in the dusty hills of California, but in the deep seabeds of the Pacific Ocean. It’s being driven by an insatiable global demand for the critical minerals that power our electric cars, smartphones and computer chips. These minerals are currently being mined on land, but they could be extracted from seabeds in places like the Gulf of Alaska or waters around U.S. Pacific Island territories.
In fact, the Trump administration wants to fast track the review of permits for deep-sea mining. But Astrid Leitner has concerns. She is an oceanographer and an assistant professor in the College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University, and she joins us now. It’s great to have you on the show.
Astrid Leitner: Thanks for having me.
Miller: When did you first get interested in deep-sea mining?
Leitner: Yes, I’ve been working on deep-sea mining now for over a decade. As an oceanographer and as a deep-sea scientist, this is really kind of the largest impact, man-made impact, on the deep sea. And you can’t be a deep-sea scientist now without being interested in it, right? We haven’t had anything on this scale, ever in our history. And so, I think almost everybody in the deep-sea community has to be interested in deep-sea mining.
So, I actually started off my deep-sea career on my PhD working in a deep-sea mining region in the Central Pacific. And really working to start some of these environmental baseline assessments since those regions are very, very poorly explored scientifically. In a lot of these places, we didn’t even have maps and we still don’t have maps. So yeah, I’ve been interested really in deep-sea mining from the get-go of my career.
Miller: A Canadian company has applied for an exploration license and commercial recovery permit in a place known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. What is this CCZ?
Leitner: Yes. The CCZ is a very large region between about Hawaii and mainland Mexico. It’s about the extent of the continental United States, to give you some scale. So, a truly massive region. And this region of the ocean is covered in these manganese nodules or polymetallic nodules, and that is one of the sea floor critical mineral deposits that this company and most of the other companies that are interested in deep-sea mining are really targeting. So, the CCZ is kind of the primary region of interest right now. It’s located in international waters and that’s kind of in addition to the mining you talked about that may be occurring pretty soon here in our economic exclusive zone. So around, for example, the Gulf of Alaska around the Pacific Islands territories.
Miller: How much commercial level deep-sea mining has ever happened anywhere?
Leitner: None. So this is something that has never happened before in the history of humanity. We have not had the technology, and honestly, the economic situation hasn’t been such that it’s been worth it to try to make this happen. We’ve known about these deposits now. For a very long time, actually, since the 1800s, when people were kind of taking the first deep-sea samples, we’ve pulled up some of these minerals, right? So, we’ve known that the deposits are there. But we haven’t thought that this would be a viable source of these minerals until very, very recently. There was a push kind of in the 1970s and 1980s. Again, the economic situation, the economic drivers weren’t there, the technology really wasn’t there. And now with this advent of all of our new technologies and this push for our transition to renewable energies and our necessity of new battery technologies, there is this renewed push that kind of started maybe about 10-15 years ago again.
Miller: When we say deep-sea mining, how deep are we talking about?
Leitner: Yes, that’s a great question. Very, very deep. So these manganese nodules ‒ for example, the Clarion-Clipperton zone ‒ occur at about 4,000 to 5,000 meters. So, over 15,000 feet deep. So the technology required to get to these habitats is actually quite challenging and still being developed.
Miller: So meaning three miles down. That’s deeper than, say, oil drilling in an ocean floor would be?
Lietner: Absolutely.
Miller: Like significantly deeper?
Leitner: Significantly deeper, yes. So deep oil extraction has been moving deeper and deeper, but we are talking vastly deeper than that, more than double the depth there.
Miller: Given how, I was gonna say how rare this is, but how unprecedented this is on a commercial level, how much can you as a scientist say definitively about the environmental impacts?
Leitner: Yes. Well, this is what we’ve been asked to do, right? And it’s very, very challenging. Well, there has been a significant amount of effort and foundational research in deep-sea science that we can draw from. But again, it’s been more exploratory. It’s been more, what are the drivers of these ecosystems? What kind of oceanography and what kind of environmental conditions are causing the patterns that we see. What are the basic ecological patterns? What are the animals that live there? We are so far from understanding those systems on a detailed enough level to be able to then predict what something like this massive impact would really cause.
We have been doing a lot of research to try to get at that. But again, doing experiments where we do controlled trials, for example, is very, very challenging in these locations. I mean, it is a real undertaking to even get a research expedition out into the Central Pacific. We’re talking about just driving a ship for sometimes a week to even get to our sampling sites, which is very, very expensive, and then being able to take some of these samples.
Miller: A California-based company called Impossible Metals was granted approval for a leasing process to explore for deep-sea minerals off the coast of American Samoa. The CEO of the company, Oliver Gunasekara, spoke at a House Natural Resources Subcommittee last year. I want to play you and our listeners part of what he said.
Oliver Gunasekara [recorded]: Let’s consider how we get the metals we use today. Let’s take nickel. Seventy-five percent of it comes from rainforests in Indonesia. The majority is used in stainless steel, a little bit in batteries. Those rainforests are being completely destroyed because the nickel laterite ore is directly below the rainforest. The biodiversity, the carbon storage is immense. Let’s talk about the social impact. There are indigenous people that live. Often they’re being forced off their land at gunpoint. The water is being polluted, the fish are dying. It’s an absolutely terrible situation. And guess who controls all of it? China.
Miller: What’s your response to this basic argument that he and many others are making that what they’re proposing to do, what they’re asking for permission to do, would have a much smaller overall environmental footprint than what’s already happening?
Leitner: I think this is a very kind of classic argument, basically. Look at how bad these practices are and we will do better. Really, this is not actually an argument either pro or con for deep-sea mining. This is kind of a distraction technique, I think that people use. We are not talking about deep-sea mining being an alternative. It’s an add-on. While all of the land-based mining extraction increases, we’re talking about adding a whole new industry in a whole new environment where we would also have additional environmental and social and human impacts. So, that’s my first reaction.
The second thing is that he makes two arguments both about biodiversity and about carbon sequestration. And that’s interesting because those are actually our primary concerns in the deep-sea community about the impacts of deep-sea mining. So the deep-sea floor is actually a major long-term storage reservoir of carbon. So, the deep-sea acts to sequester and store carbon on very long and geologic time scales, and we are worried that deep-sea mining and the kind of disturbance of the deep-sea microbial and also the larger community will impact carbon cycling. We actually have data on this. So, in a small test mining track that was done almost three decades ago, we have found that carbon cycling is still reduced substantially in the places that were directly impacted by that trial.
Miller: Well, let me play you another clip though, because I think one of the arguments is that technology has changed since then. So this is one more thing that that CEO of Impossible Metals ‒ the actual name of the company ‒ this is more of what he said to House members.
Gunasekara [recorded]: Our underwater robots hover to collect the mineral-rich nodules from the seabed through an AI-driven selective harvesting. We pick up nodules individually, avoiding all visible life and leaving 60% of the nodules untouched to preserve the marine biodiversity. Today, a new land-based mine in the U.S. takes 29 years. Seabed mining is the vital alternative. We can deliver critical minerals at a commercial scale in just three years,10x faster, 10x cheaper, 10x lower impact and without relying on China.
Miller: So Astrid Leitner, do AI-enabled robotic mineral harvesters allay your fears?
Leitner: There are certainly technologies like the one proposed by Impossible Minerals ‒ or Metals ‒ that would mitigate some of the concerns that we have. The problem is that technology is not there yet, despite what their CEO is pitching. And that is not the current harvester model. And so the current harvester model actually vacuums up the top five centimeters of sediment along with all the rocks on the seabed.
Despite the flashy numbers he cites, we are not yet clear that this will be economically viable, even if you vacuum up 100% of all of the nodules that are in your track. So, this is 10x faster, cheaper, better, all this, that is a sales pitch, but we have not gotten the data that suggests that that is actually the case.
It’s also still incredibly risky. The technologies that, for example, Impossible Metals proposes is a great alternative to reduce some of the impacts if it works, but it’s a very complex system, and we haven’t seen those trials work successfully at depth in those regions. So, the technology is not there.
I do think that scientists need to continue to be at the table to continue to advise these companies on how to reduce the impacts. If we as kind of a global society and humanity decide that we are going to kind of weigh the pros and cons and go forward with this, I think scientists really have a critical role to play ‒ scientists and engineers ‒ in advising how to do this in terms of reducing impact. Because again, they talk about biodiversity being not an issue, but biodiversity levels in the deep sea are actually similar in a by area, rate to the deep, to the rainforest. So they say the rainforest is so diverse. So is the deep sea, right?
Miller: And so what can you tell us? I’m glad you came here because I want to hear more about this. What do we know, and maybe also what don’t we know, about the biodiversity in these gigantic areas?
Leitner: Yes, absolutely. I mean, what we do know is that biodiversity levels are extremely high, like I said. They are characterized by a really high level of what we call super rare species. So, we will take samples ‒ even samples that are relatively next to each other ‒ and find large numbers of unique species where we find just a single representative. And that means that extinction risks are very high. That means that heterogeneity – so the differences that we see in biodiversity and in the communities – is very, very high on all kinds of scales.
So we’ve taken samples where we compare a couple meters of sea floor that are next to each other and found significant differences. We’ve seen that on the scale of two neighboring mining claim areas being very different, and we’ve seen that on the regional scale. And so we are really concerned about biodiversity. Also, half of the megafauna, for example, the large animals that we can see with the naked eye that we sampled in the Clarion-Clipperton zone were new to science. So we are still in such a stage of discovery still in these areas. Again, they’re hard to get to. We don’t have a lot of historical sampling. And so we are potentially placing at risk a biodiversity that we’re not even fully aware of yet.
Miller: Oregon, Washington, California, Hawaii and American Samoa have all prohibited deep-sea mining in their waters. Do those state or territory level prohibitions carry any weight in these conversations?
Leitner: Sorry, you were breaking up a little bit there. Can you repeat just a…
Miller: I noted that Oregon, Washington, California, Hawaii and American Samoa have all prohibited deep-sea mining in their waters. But do those state or territory level prohibitions carry any weight if the federal government wants to move forward?
Leitner: Yeah, I mean, it’s difficult, and this is kind of a classic states rights versus federal rules issue. We shall see where that shakes out politically. Again, this is very, very new. The U.S. has not kind of thrown their hat in the ring of deep-sea mining until very recently and is now kind of reviving old laws that were put into place in the 70s and 80s and trying to figure out how they’re going to permit this process. And so, I don’t think the answers are clear. And that is one of the reasons why it is critical at this moment in time that the public becomes aware of this issue, gets some education on this and is allowed to weigh in. Because I do think that local concerns, especially in coastal states, in island nations need to be at the table as well and need to be heard, right?
So, I think it remains to be seen how the politics will shake out, but I do think that there’s a role to play with local communities and also the international conservation and the international scientific community.
Miller: What role do you think people like you play, scientists can play right now in shaping that public opinion, given the outright mistrust that this administration and some members of the public are currently showing towards scientists?
Leitner: Yes, I think it’s been… It’s a little tricky. I feel like confidence in scientists in the general public has eroded, which is very concerning. I think scientists have a critical role to play here. And I’ve said that before, that we really need to have a seat at the table in terms of allowing a better understanding of what is at risk. Because only when we understand what the risks and the possible harms are, can we make the decision of what is acceptable harm, what is acceptable risk, what is okay in this push for renewables. We need the information there and that’s really where science comes in.
But scientists need both to work with these companies, but they also need to be able to work independently. And that has been challenging in the deep-sea mining sphere because most of the science that has been conducted in these mining regions has been funded by the companies themselves. The International Seabed Authority, which is a U.N. body that’s kind of governing the CCZ and the seabed resources in the international waters, they have mandated that these companies are responsible for creating their environmental baselines, but that also means that there’s a lack of independently funded science and that is really, really critical.
Miller: Astrid Leitner, thanks very much.
Leitner: Thank you for having me.
Miller: Astrid Leitner is an oceanographer and a professor in the College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University.oad |Feedback
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