(Russia Today - 2013) - The Cook Islands government in the Pacific has plans to send robots to the sea floor to harvest minerals that are believed to be worth tens of billions of dollars.
Mining the minerals on the bottom of the South Pacific could increase the country's gross domestic product a hundredfold, the Cook Islands' Finance Minister Mark Brown told the Guardian. He believes the seabed minerals could transform the 14,000 inhabitants into some of the richest in the world in terms of per-capita income.
Despite environmentalists warnings that mining could irreparably damage the country's beaches and marine ecosystem, recent technological advances make mining more possible and the economics make it more likely.
Read more - http://rt.com/business/deep-sea-mining-cook-islands-112/
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Deep Sea Mining in Papua, New Guinea
(SciDevNet 2012) - Deep sea mining (DSM) is the new frontier in extractive mining. For the companies involved, as well as the governments that own the mining rights, it offers substantial profits.
However DSM is still experimental in nature, with potentially vast adverse environmental effects.
It also makes use of new technologies that have yet to be tested.In January 2011, the government of Papua New Guinea (PNG) granted the world's first deep-sea mining lease to Nautilus Minerals Inc, a Canadian mining firm, which is about to embark on a seabed mining project known as the Solwara 1 project.
However fears have been expressed by critics of the project that not enough research has been carried out to enable convincing conclusions to be drawn on the likely environmental impacts of DSM, particularly as there is very little knowledge of biological diversity and ecosystems within the deposit areas.
The ecosystems surrounding hydrothermal vents combine superheated and highly mineralized vent fluids with microbes that are capable of using chemicals as a nutritional source. In recent years, such ecosystems have been found to host over 500 species previously unknown to science.
Read more - http://www.scidev.net/global/biodiversity/opinion/deep-sea-mining-a-dangerous-experiment.html
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How Deep Sea Mining (DSM) could destroy the cradle of life on Earth.
(The Ecologist - October 2010) - ‘It’s the cradle of life on earth,’ explains Dr Rod Fujita from the Environmental Defense Fund and author of studies looking into deep-sea mining, ‘ and the only one that does not depend on sunlight.
There are species there that are found nowhere else on earth. It’s not like any land habitats we are used to; in fact you have to have your perspective altered to appreciate this deep-sea world,’ he says.
Of particular concern are the hundreds of thousands of tonnes of waste that will be produced by the mining process, which Professor Richard Steiner, from the University of Alaska, compares to that of a ‘giant underwater tractor’ and which will be pumped onto deeper seabeds nearby.
Dr Fujita said the physics of water as well as weather and currents made it difficult to predict or contain any spill and that deep-sea mining had the capacity to produce pollution that could travel across into international waters.
Read more -
http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/653840/how_deepsea_mining_could_destroy_the_cradle_of_life_on_earth.html
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Link to this post - http://ottersandsciencenews.blogspot.ca/2013/08/deep-sea-mining-in-paradise.html
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