News from a Changing Planet -- #17
A hundred million years ago or so, a shark lost a tooth.
The tooth drifted down to the ocean floor, about 5000 meters below the surface, eventually settling on the abyssal plain, somewhere between Hawai’i and Mexico. Between then and now, metals and other materials built up around the tooth, forming what scientists call a polymetallic nodule, about the size of a potato.
If I've spoken to you in the last 6 months or so, I've probably forced a monologue on you talked to you about deep-sea mining. The basic gist of it is this: at the bottom of the ocean around the world, there are significant deposits of metals, including some of the metals that are currently necessary for the clean energy transition -- electric vehicle batteries, wind turbines, and solar panels -- but also for things like computer and phone batteries, and the millions of other rechargeable electronic devices that now fill our homes. As this transition accelerates and more and more people can afford electronics or electric vehicles, the world will need more of these metals.
Getting them from anywhere -- on land or in the sea -- has an impact. Recycling, currently very expensive, can be energy- or chemically-intensive (or both!) and doesn't yet exist at the scale required to mine less around the world. (I'll give you three guesses on who wants it to stay that way!)
But, as you can imagine, this could come at an enormous risk to the deep ocean, one of the last pristine ecosystems on earth, and, arguably, the world's most important climate sink. To most scientists who study any part of the ocean, but especially the deep ocean, beginning to mine the ocean floor is not something to stumble into. It could disturb carbon sinks, extinguish newly-discovered (by scientists) species, affect whale and tuna migration, and come at the cost of the people of Pacific Island nations (some of which are at the forefront of the push to mine), who are already suffering from the existential threat of sea level rise, in the form of damage to fishing stocks, livelihoods, and sites of spiritual significance. All in all, it could destroy this most crucial ecosystem.
After many months of trying, I finally published a story today in Yale Environment 360, an online environmental magazine, about deep sea mining! So if any of the above was interesting to you, please check out the story (for the above in much greater detail), which you can find here: https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-race-for-ev-parts-leads-to-risky-deep-ocean-mining
If you're wondering why I haven't written a newsletter in a while, part of it is because my brain has been consumed with reporting this over the last 6 months and then finding a place to publish it! But I promise that I am working on something about infrastructure and (I hope!) you won't be disappointed by that either.
I would love, as always, to hear from you about what you'd like to read here and if you have any questions or thoughts or anything else about deep sea mining, I am all ears!
Tatiana