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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."
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!
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
The Jehovahs once brought round a leaflet containing exciting news of this new stuff that "scientists" had discovered on the ocean floor. The same "scientists" who all believe that god is a fact and believe in biblical creation.
This new fuel source was going to provide all our energy needs without mention of any damage to the environment and cost of extraction.
Mind you, when the earth is only a few thousand years old and the end of it is nigh anyway, why does it matter if you ruin the environment?
I believe China is getting a bit god-botherery these days.
Stick Men
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.
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.
On the scale of disasters, Deepwater Horizon is a blip. A nothing. It's done far less harm to Louisiana wetlands than the Old River Control.
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
We Americans keep tying our own hands behind our backs. Energy and resources = Power.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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''.
a cover for a deep-sea cable tapping sub?
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.
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.
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.