![]() ![]() Proponents of deep-sea mining argue that the sooner it starts the better. Permits to begin commercial mining could be issued within a few years. Most are looking to slurp up the nodules others are hoping to excavate stretches of the ocean floor that are rich in cobalt and copper. As one recent report put it, “The Pacific Ocean is the scene of a new wild west.” Thirty companies have received permits from the I.S.A. The president of the company likened the exercise to “standing on the top of the Empire State Building, trying to pick up small stones on the sidewalk using a long straw, at night.”Īfter the Glomar expeditions, interest in seabed mining waned. But then, in a curious twist, a real company called Ocean Minerals leased the Glomar to collect nodules from the seabed west of Baja California. In fact, the ship was operated by the C.I.A., which was trying to raise a sunken Soviet submarine. In the summer of 1974, a drillship purportedly belonging to Howard Hughes-the Hughes Glomar Explorer-anchored north of Midway Atoll, ostensibly to bring up nodules from the depths. The first attempts to harvest this submerged wealth were undertaken nearly fifty years ago. They contain six thousand times as much tellurium, a metal that’s even rarer than the rare earths. It has been estimated that, collectively, the nodules on the bottom of the ocean contain six times as much cobalt, three times as much nickel, and four times as much of the rare-earth metal yttrium as there is on land. A single spud-size nugget might take some three million years to form. The process by which the metals accumulate is not entirely understood however, it’s thought to be exceedingly slow. ![]() The lumps, known formally as polymetallic nodules, consist of layers of ore that have built up around bits of marine debris, such as ancient shark teeth. Mostly, these take the shape of lumps that resemble blackened potatoes. ![]() Scattered across the Area are great riches. ![]()
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