In just one year, Chinese companies have explored Australia to buy a coal company, to Guinea secure access to aluminium, diamonds and gold, and to Iraq to insure a proportion its expected post-war oil production. The government-supported companies are relentless in securing the resources to power their country’s industrial growth and now China hopes to be the first to exploit a source of minerals that has remained largely untouched: the floor of the deep sea.
This May a segment of the Chinese government submitted plans to explore the seabed around an underwater ridge in the Indian Ocean near Madagascar. Here on the ocean floor, hot springs called hydrothermal vents have formed deposits containing gold, silver, copper, nickel, cobalt, and tellurium.
However, there are huge environmental concerns surrounding such deep-sea exploration; and the biggest worry is that other countries will undoubtedly follow China. The richest lodes of minerals are located at hydrothermal vents where volcanic activity beneath the earth’s crust sends sulphur-rich plumes up through cracks in the ocean floor. These plumes support unique ecosystems of animals and microbes which do not depend on sunlight or photosynthesis like other earthly ecosystems, but on the chemicals in the plume. The vents excrete microbes which feed larger animals like red-tipped tubeworms, anemones, giant red-fleshed clams, some jellyfish, shrimp, snails, lobsters, and blind white crabs.
Over 1,300 species previously unknown to science have been discovered at the vents since 1977. Marine biologist Cindy Lee van Dover from Duke University explains, “We go back to a site dozens of times and find new species routinely.” Two years later, scientists discovered that the same life-supporting vents also create the mineral deposits that China is after. According to marine geologist Peter Rona of Rutgers University, the ocean temperatures cause the metal sulfides to crystallize, resulting in: “seafloor massive sulfide deposits” that are rich in valuable metals.
These deposits really are massive: one deposit of copper, iron, zinc, gold, and silver sulfides in the Atlantic is, at 600 feet across and 120 feet high, huge. In 2009 the Canadian sea-mining firm Nautilus Minerals estimated that there are thousands of underwater sulfide systems have potential to yield “several billion tons of copper” alone each year.
“It would be a great loss to society if we destroyed for commercial benefit what society has not yet discovered,” says Sari Tolvanen, an oceans campaigner for Greenpeace. “It would be like going to a brand-new continent and mining the most valuable rainforests without first studying them.”
There are also many benefits to the new underwater pursuits, and according to some scientists, the risk mining poses to the vent communities may be smaller than originally feared. Seafloor deposits are much more concentrated than those on land and seafloor ore also has more gold, zinc, and silver than land deposits do. It’s thought seafloor mining should make economic sense as less material needs to be processed, which is the most environmentally destructive part of mining.
China has not been clear yet on whether it intends to take steps to protect the vents: “[We are] not at the mining stage yet,” says Jin Jiancai, Secretary-General of government run group China Ocean Mineral Resources R&D Association. “We are currently in the prospecting research period, taking samples from the seabed [and doing] environmental assessments.”