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The Next Gold Rush Will Be 5,000 Feet Under the Sea, With Robot Drones (vice.com)
merbs writes: In Papua New Guinea, one well-financed, first-mover company is about to pioneer deep sea mining. And that will mean dispatching a fleet of giant remote-operated robotic miners 5,000 feet below the surface to harvest the riches scattered across ocean floor. These mammoth underwater vehicles look like they've been hauled off the set of a sci-fi film—think Avatar meets The Abyss. And they'll be dredging up copper, gold, and other valuable minerals, far beneath the gaze of human eyes.
They do however involve large transportation of materials up from the sea bed, most of which is released to float down.
The risks are radically different than land based mining and relatively unknown.
But I am a firm believer in diversification of risk. I'd rather have some coal and some nuclear, rather than just one, as the risks are different.
Similarly, undersea gold mining is worth a pilot project or two to see how it affects the local ecology.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
When I was a kid I read about manganese nodule mining on the sea floor. It later turned out that it was Project Azorian, where the nodules were a cover story for a CIA-funded attempt to lift a Soviet sub from the sea floor.
In 1968, a Soviet ballistic missile submarine sank in the Pacific ocean. In the 1970s, the CIA built a ship, the Glomar Explorer, to attempt to recover this submarine. The CIA got Howard Hughes to provide a public front for the ship's construction. Its cover story was that it was going to mine manganese nodules off the ocean floor. As part of this cover, there was a massive disinformation campaign regarding the amount of valuable materials which could be mined (or vacuumed as some of the news stories described it) off the ocean floor. Newspaper and magazine articles proclaimed how by the turn of the century, we would be mining most of our metals from the ocean. Growing up in the 1970s as a kid extremely interested in ocean sciences, I read a huge number of these stories with fascination.
The cover for the operation was blown in 1975. But because of the disinformation campaign, it's still difficult to tell if these proposed mining operations have in fact accurately analyzed the financial viability of mining materials from the ocean floor. Or if they've been taken in by the hype generated as a cover story decades ago, and are assuming that if there were so many stories in major publications about the financial viability of ocean floor mining, that someone must've done their due diligence and concluded it was in fact financially viable. (As for the submarine, it broke while it was being hauled up to the surface, and the CIA only managed to recover about the front third of it. The more valuable conning tower section and propeller were lost. The recovered bow contained a couple nuclear torpedoes tough, so the CIA considered the operation one of their greatest successes of the Cold War.)