Cuels with valuable minerals can be found across the sea floor in some parts of the ocean. Here, the Mengenies nodules were found off the southeastern United States in 2019.
Noaa Exploration and Search Office
Hide the explanatory name
Switch the explanatory name
Noaa Exploration and Search Office
President Trump signed an executive on Thursday aimed at facilitating companies to extract the deep sea floor, saying that it will create “strong local supplies for critical minerals.”
There is currently no deep mining in the depths of the seas anywhere in the world. But companies are long awaited at the ocean floor as a potential source of minerals such as nickel, cobalt, manganese and copper, which are used in batteries for electric cars and other technologies.
These minerals can be found in nodules the size of potatoes dumped on the ocean floor. Many nodules are in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, outside the legal lands of individual countries.
Thursday’s order may circumvent the ongoing international negotiations to regulate the depths of the depths of the seas.
These areas were traditionally supervised by an international organization, the International Sea Foundation (ISA). ISA hosted for years to try to produce a bases book to rule the mining industry at the potential sea floor. The United States did not believe the treaty that governs the sea floor, and it is not a member of ISA voting, although in the past under previous departments that respected the ISA process.
He has Executive order, Trump issued instructions to federal agencies to accelerate the process of reviewing and issuing mining permits at the sea floor in both American and international lands. It will be used by an American law since 1980, “The Law of Difficult Metal Resources on the Sea Flood”.
Scientists and environmental groups have condemned this matter, on the pretext that opening the sea floor in the depths of mining can disrupt important marine ecosystems and damage the fishing industry.
“This is planned for some less flexible ecosystems on this planet,” he says. Douglas McCalliProfessor of Ocean Science at the University of California Santa Barbara. “It will have a catastrophic biological consequences.”
Mukkuli says underwater mining can create columns of deposits that can suffocate marine life, and destroy the food networks on which fish depends.
There are also important questions about whether we really need the sea floor mining to get enough of these minerals to get techniques such as batteries, he says Mika ZieglerAssistant Professor of Energy and Chemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
While researchers two years ago were concerned about the constraints of mineral mining, such as cobalt and nickel, a variety of alternative battery chemistry has been developed that may reduce the need for these elements, says Ziegler.
People said that we will be limited cobalt, then we found a group of alternative chemistry that used less [or no] Ziegler, cobalt, the techniques change quickly and alternatives are explored.
At least one company of its interest in applying for a permit to extract the sea floor through the American Minerals Company, a Canadian mining company, said it will seek a permit from the Trump administration. Company shares 44 % rose by the end of Thursday.