Rachel Pendergrass | 15 November 2018 Giant gyers of floating plastic have long been at the forefront of the public conversation around ocean pollution, but there has been a dearth of research on the deeper issue of plastic that reaches below the surface. Since the onset of mainstream plastic production begin in the 1940s and […]
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Harriet Harden-Davies | 15 November 2018 “This is a chance to take a course correction while we still can…if we pull together, we can make it”. Rena Lee, president of the intergovernmental conference—fondly referred to as Madame Captain—set an ambitious, positive and suitably nautical tone to open historic negotiations on 4 September 2018 at the […]
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Deep-sea mining is plagued by inscrutable jargon that makes it very difficult to newcomers to engage meaningfully with the industry. One of the big complaints I heard at the Deep-sea Biology Symposium from graduate students and professionals who hadn’t spent much time on mining was that there were so many acronyms, generic technical terms, and […]
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This week, Global Sea Mineral Resources unveiled Patania II, a pre-prototype polymetallic nodule collector built to work in the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone. Patania II is the successor to Patania I, which was successfully tested in the Central Pacific Ocean last year. Patania I was a track system designed to crawl across the deep seafloor of […]
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“This is an electric vehicle battery,” Gerard Barron exclaims as he holds a fist-size nodule, dark and lumpy, up to the screen. For Barron, CEO of DeepGreen Resources, harvesting polymetallic metals from the seafloor is not just a new mining venture, it is a mission to transition away from fossil fuels into a new, green […]
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If you were to ask a new stakeholder to name the most frustrating aspect of trying to understand the current state of deep-sea mining, they would likely begin with the arcane acronyms and idioms of The Authority (that’s the International Seabed Authority for those still struggling with the lingo). Not far behind would be the […]
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I like to keep an eye out for classic books from the early days of ocean technology, both factual and fiction. From Monturiol’s Dream to Arthur C. Clarke’s The Deep Range, these books provide insight into how we thought about deep-sea exploration and exploitation throughout the 21st century. This month, I stumbled upon a copy […]
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The Deep-sea Biology Symposium convened last week for its triennial meeting. Over the course of 5 days, participants shared the latest discoveries in deep-sea biology, ecology, and stewardship. Not surprisingly, deep-sea mining played a major role in the weeks discussion. Though it’s hard to capture the breadth of the topics discussed (and many presentations remain […]
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The Deep-Ocean Stewardship Initiative is a collective of mostly marine scientists whose goal is to use science, technology, policy, law and economics to advise on ecosystem-based management of resource use in the deep ocean as well as strategies to maintain the integrity of deep-ocean ecosystems within and beyond national jurisdiction. DOSI met on Sunday, September […]
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A series of tantalizing tracks on the seafloor led Dr. Leigh Marsh on a journey of discovery that could have significant implications for our understanding of the ecology of nodule fields while extending the record for deep diving marine mammals by over 1000 meters. It began in 2015, when the science team aboard the RRS […]
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