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China Plans To Mine the Yellow Sea Floor
eldavojohn writes "Details are limited but state media is reporting on $75 million being put into a new research facility
in Qingdao, Shandong Province that will conduct research into mining the sea floor. From the article: 'Scientists believe sea beds at a depth of 4,000 to 6,000 meters hold abundant deposits of rare metals and methane hydrate, a solidified form of natural gas bound into ice that can serve as a new energy source.' The research center's first goal is to do surveying and exploration with a new submersible named 'Jiaolong' (a mythical aquatic Chinese dragon). Hopefully these quests yield energy resources to meet growing demand for resources like liquefied coal in China."
methane hydrate, a solidified form of natural gas bound into ice that can serve as a new energy source
So the Chinese government got visited by the Jehovah's Witnesses too?
Releasing even more of one of the most effective greenhouse gasses (methane)..
Anyone who is serious understands we can't keep gobbling up resources the way the West has been since WWII. Yet no one stops to think that moving to the suburbs and having kids is a huge contributor to the demand for resources.
The only good thing is that things will start getting more and more expensive as oil gets harder and harder to get, and therefore anything that depends on cheap energy (everything) starts getting not so cheap.
The next 50 years will be interesting, to say the least.
If only the true costs of carbon pollution were built into the price of causing it, China's repressedly low labor costs couldn't govern the vast amount of pollution it generates.
The Tragedy of the Commons can be protected against by only government, not market, action.
--
make install -not war
The way I see it, as long as we dig up the bottom of the ocean fast enough, we can counteract the rising water levels due to global warming! The more we dig, the more we burn, the more it rises, the more we dig; nature back in balance~!
Horray!
There's also a bunch dissolved in the water. Distillation can serve a dual purpose. I still don't know why we dig salt mines with the great abundance right there in the oceans. Yeah yeah yeah... "It's the economy, stupid" Same reason we'd rather fight wars over water itself.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
The river just carries away everything you dig up, no need for expensive hauling equipment!
I've heard that uncontrolled capture of methane hydrate can lead to disasters worse than Deepwater Horizon. I hope China is careful or they headlines won't be pretty.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Some people are worried that global warming will trigger a methyl hydrate apocalypse in which the vast stores of methyl hydrate locked into ice at the bottom of many bodies of water begins to boil and release all the methane into the atmosphere causing a greenhouse effect that's much, much worse than the CO2 one we're causing for ourselves now.
I suppose that having the methyl hydrate mined and turned into CO2 is better than having it released as methane. But that is somehow little comfort.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Ahhh. This is mining in the sense of going after energy and ore. When I read that title I thought "WOW. Who uses depth charge exploding sea mines any more? Um, are they preparing for war?"
Thankfully this is just peaceful science. Right? RIGHT?
Procrastinating life a way at a rapid rate of speed.
when it loses buoyancy after encountering those methane packets.
time for more nuke power that is the good 24/7 power that lasts a long time.
The pressure is keeping it from changing to gas. If you lift it, the pressure drops and it goes to gaseous state. If enough water above it is displaced by anything including bubbles, then the pressure drops and it goes to gas.
There is also the matter of the amount of sediment that the mining, if done on the surface of the ocean floor will stir up and how many years it will take to settle. Fish and other sea life do it in minutes. Sea life does not like changes in turbidity and there is the potential for very far reaching problems lasting a very long time. Water takes about 400 years to go full cycle from surface to bottom to surface again.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Doesn't China already have a lock on most of the world's known surface deposits of rare earth elements? And now they are making moves to secure rare earths on the sea floor. They'll be firmly in the driver's seat soon on many fronts.
Khao Yai Land
Ftfy. Studying sea floor mining is not new.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Seabed's nectar?
False alarm.
Well, in a manner of speaking. We'd still be fucked ecologically.
Pretty much the same cover story.
They were going to collect metal right off the top of the ocean floor.
In a way, they did.
No brain, no pain.
plus mining for deposits of rare metals and methane hydrate, equals DEAD SEA. Oh and don't forget damage to the environment. I guess they don't really care too much about mythical water dragons.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
Too bad none of them are involved in this project.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
What the media is not reporting is that "Jiaolong" is a 5,000 meter long tube that ferries disenfranchised peoples from the surface to the ocean floor. Unemployed manufacturing sector workers are put into protective suits and then get injected into the Jiaolong tube. They are whooshed to the bottom of the ocean floor, where they are instructed on pain of torture to their family to claw at the ocean floor. If they find hydrate or interesting metals, they are instructed to push a little orange button on their jumpsuit which triggers a collection mechanism in their gloves. If they are running short of breath, they push a little green button. Unfortunately the little green button is not wired to anything. When the clawer eventually expires, the vacuum sucks them out and they spend a little while floating to the top of the ocean whereupon their protective suit is reclaimed and the process is started anew.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
Nautilus Minerals has been working on mining massive sulphide mounds for several years now, they even have a pilot project in Papua-New Guinea. One of the primary concerns was all the underwater life (black smokers etc) they'd be killing. Other than that, these mounds are incredibly rich in all sorts of minerals - and take thousands of years to grow.
We Americans keep tying our own hands behind our backs. Energy and resources = Power.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Hasn't someone proposed mining the ocean floor once before?
Studying sea floor mining is not new.
Or is it "studying" instead of studying? Or whose sunken submarines are they planning to recover?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
How better to begin learning what it will take for Lunar expansion? With raw materials literally laying on the surface of either environment?
Personally, my mind ponders the wording used in Psalms, 107:23 KJV. Maybe a minor modification to include women, and a minor edit for altitudes greater than 60 miles.
Problem Solved!
Hey, we're looking for 10,000 volunteers to MINE THE SEA FLOOR! Low wages, sleep in the sea, and we're ALMOST COMPLETELY POSITIVE that there won't be a news story in 6 months that 34 sea floor miners have been trapped in a cave-in for 4 months! Who's up for it?!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
While this research takes place in largely uncontested Yellow sea, any success could very well bolster the Chinese government's hawkish stand on naval borders.
The disputes with Japan and Taiwan are well known. It recently claimed sovereignty of regions of the South China Sea that are well beyond common UN agreements on sovereignty and openly challenged by ASEAN neighbors.
Even the Yellow Sea is not without conflict, in which even the US is directly involved. At the heart of the matter is what the article calls ``one element in what appears to be an attempt to turn the seas near it into a Chinese lake''.
Old news!
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
a cover for a deep-sea cable tapping sub?
You can have evaporation ponds, using wind power to pump the sea water.
The big problem then is separating the more valuable compounds from the sodium chloride
Since the oceanic crust is composed of mafic material with higher levels of metals, wouldn't this be a good place to look for metals. The continental crust is much more metal poor and not as good a place to mine it seems. In many ways it seems the continents are not good places to mine. AS well, eventually the oceanic crust will be recycled so any mining of the ocean floor would cause only temporary damage to the terrain. So the effects of mining the ocean floor are relatively short lived. The oceanic crust is made from material directly from the interior of the earth and continents however are only composed a fraction of material, from the interior containing mostly non metallic substances. So the oceanic crust is likely going to be more metal rich. The effects of mining there would seem to have far less environmental impacts.
An interesting side note, the continents being so poor in metal makes them lighter and unable to subduct and also to float higher, which leads to the appearance of land. Continental rock is the result of volcanic arc subduction fractional melting which results in a lower metal felsic rock that becomes the continental crust. It is due to plate tectonics and arc subduction magmatism that we see the continent/oceanic crust duality that has led to land on otherwise what would have been an ocean planet. SInce the oceanic crust can be subducted it is entirely less than 180 million years old and the only rocks from the early history oif the earth exist on the continents.
As you should have noticed with the Olympics, China is putting in more work to reduce pollution than anywhere else and luckily they didn't stop after the Olympics.
You were just impressed by the landscaping.
Mining the seafloor would be a local ecological disaster. A great deal of thought needs to be put in to how disrupting the sea floor would affect the entire food chain. Unfortunately the Chinese record on such things is not very good - witness the devastation caused by deforestation and flooding in areas affected by the Three Gorges Dam project.
Should read: "China plans to tap fibre-optic cables on the sea floor".
Remember the "manganese nodules" cover story for Glomar Challenger from the 1970s?
Most people posting don't seem to acknowledge that there wouldn't be any people doing mining with five miles of water above them. This would all be done by autonomous robots. Quite honestly, I like the idea, as long as it doesn't pollute the water (I don't see why it should, if it's just the mechanical removal of stuff).
One reason why I love the idea of autonomous mining is because I want this sort of thing to happen on the moon. That ore, processed on the lunar surface, can be shot into orbit with a simple railgun and get used for whatever we want, like a permanent space station at a liberation point.
Debugging the technique in a hostile place on Earth sounds like a good idea to me.
Yellow sea is losing its fish quickly. It is only a matter of time before China has depleted that area. Even now, they send fishing boats over to America, grab their catch, sell it in LA, then on the way out, grab a whole another load (double what they are allowed to). Basically, we need to stop that, or our western seaboard will look similar to Yellow Sea.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Even if true, that would still be more than anyone else.
Hi, I am in Peru right now, and I was in Bolivia before that, Brazil before that....
It is undeniably true that people in the west consume orders of magnitude more stuff than down here. It is also true that a lot of the environmental destruction happening here is to satiate consumer needs of the west. HOWEVER, it is important to note two things.
Sorry stud, but argue as you will, the west does not bear sole responsibility for this shit sandwich that we all have to eat, and it is legitimate for westerners to criticize China's growing penchant to pollute (and block efforts to curb greenhouse gasses).
A ship could drive past and explode one? Who is China at war with that they need to mine the sea. North Korea is on decent terms with them.
If the Chinese exploit the natural resources found in the Sea of China the same way they are exploiting them in Africa or even inside their own territory, then it will be a ecological disaster like no other. The stuff that brings an ELE upon us. The way they operate, they make the traditional colonial powers (i.e., Europe) and the USA (no angels themselves) look like, well, angels.
Greed can make people do some very, very bad things and the Chinese are not immune to it, trust me. The horror stories my chinese ex-girlfriend told me about chinese farming & mining, numerous anecdotes from chinese co-workers, along with what some newly arrived african acquaintances talked over coffee (the results, at so many levels, of chinese fishing techniques resemble more a neutron bomb on steroids than proper fishing, and that's just what goes on at sea), do not inspire confidence, to say the least.
If you think BP did badly in the gulf of Mexico, you haven't seen anything yet.
This story reminds me of Howard Hughes' Glomar Explorer.
The whole story is fascinating, but the gist of it is that in the 70's the CIA located and wanted to raise a Russian sub from a depth of more than 5000m (17,000 feet or so). They contracted Hughes through a CIA shell called Suma Corporation to build the Glomar Explorer and get the sub. The story sold to the public at the time was that Hughes was building the Glomar in order to mine the sea bed for the abundant minerals that were available there. Despite the CIA's best efforts to keep a lid on the story, the story was broken by the LA Times in February of 1975.
US is sending carrier task force into Yellow Sea, China is mining the region as a response.
OMGWTFBBQ we are at war!!!!!....
Oh wait...
Yellow sea has an average depth of 44m and maximum depth of 152m: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Sea
WTF is the summary talking about?
I thought they did studies on this and found that methane hydrate acts as a sort of 'glue' to allow organisms/life to survive without massive sediment 'storms' and seafloor reformations.
maybe they can pick up the bones of the glomar explorer or glomar challenger to start their undersea ``mineral'' efforts.
or maybe one of their submarines is missing?
In addition to Coal, Tar Sands, and Oil Shale, if we burn these up, we will put the earth well on it's way to the "Venus Syndrome".
People in their 30's, their kids kids will surely suffer from this. It's time something was done about it. Getting a gas saving car does nothing but make it cheaper to buy carbon based fuels somewhere else, cap and trade is a complete hoax, it's time to start making renew-ables cheaper and tax usage of carbon based fuels across the board world wide. If we do nothing we may be responsible for killing everything on the planet.
It's not that their coal has a lot of mercury, it's that they are burning a huge amount of it so tiny traces add up to a lot, meanwhile there's even larger amounts of other nasty stuff. Mercury that might poison somebody if they are unlucky enough to get it concentrated down the food chain is a tiny issue compared with particulate and NOx pollution which is killing people now, and is a hell off a lot more difficult to remove than mercury (just add water and you condense out the mercury, then it sinks to the bottom of your ash dam).
A focus on a minor part of the problem is counterproductive, especially since they can point the finger back on mercury even though we keep it pretty well contained.
The massive cost jump is also bullshit and I've got no idea where you got that from. Bag filters, scrubbers, ash dams or even electrostatic precipitators are not paticularly expensive things in terms of the huge capital cost of a thermal power station.
I looked at the link and you are making the classic divide by zero error.
Mercury emissions in the US should be almost at zero since very simple pollution controls can remove it. If you compare that with somewhere that doesn't have controls it will proportionally be very high.
China is making an effort but is at the Victorian London killer green fog stage and the controls that will reduce that are also going to be able to remove mercury (eg. scrubbers for NOx also condense out the mercury long before they get any NOx).
I also think I know where you got those inflated figures from. Some decades back a few industrialists were crying poor about pollution controls and made up all kinds of ridiculous figures. It's really the unrealistic price of the protected steel industry that has pushed manufacturing offshore instead of the extra price of pollution controls. Other countries with more stringent pollution rules and higher wages have no problem drasticly undercutting the price of US steel - even Sweden sells it cheaper after a big tax!
Somehow this makes me think that the future envisioned in Seaquest DSV may become a reality.
It makes sense that underwater mining would eventually become a necessity, as the minerals located on land become increasingly rare. We might be able to extract oil from drilling rigs on the water's surface, but getting to other types of minerals stored below the sea floor is going to require more than that.
I always thought the Japanese were going to be responsible for finding Godzilla dormant on the bottom of the sea floor...
Relevant tag: !landmine
Water takes about 400 years to go full cycle from surface to bottom to surface again.
Do you have a reference for that. No really i am serious. I have seen figures from 100-1000 years for ocean turnover. Yet i have failed miserably at finding good references.
Not any more. I had that oceanography course a Very Long Time Ago and no longer have the text book. AFAIK is was some kind of average accounting for volume of flow and distance. Recent generations have probably had time to come up with better estimates, but A 2004 EES lecture shows what you have, a guesstimate of 100-1000 years for thermohaline circulation. Some water is going to take a long time to turn over. Other water will go the short route.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.