apocalypse-tv

Nice piece in Seed Mag about the new rush to exploit the deep sea.

Seed: Deep Space

For the US, the financial stakes are huge. With its wide continental margins, it stands to gain economic control over additional territory larger than the 48 states combined, with an estimated value of $1.3 trillion in minerals, oil, and fish…

…Deep-sea mining is a much newer industry, but has the potential to balloon as oceanographers discover more and more mineral deposits on the vast ocean floor. In 2006, the world’s first two deep-sea mining companies—Nautilus Minerals of Canada and Neptune Minerals of England—both launched operations. This year, India announced a $100 million-per-year initiative to probe farther into its own cobalt- and manganese-rich waters. The hotspots are ocean floor geysers known as hydrothermal vents, where mineral-rich water bubbles up from within the Earth’s crust, accumulating over time into huge chimney-like stacks of gold, silver, copper, manganese, lead, and zinc…

And what it always boils down to:

“When we enter a new area, it’s always a race,” says Elliott Norse, president of the Marine Conservation Biology Institute, “and what it comes down to is the eternal balance in human nature—between what’s in it for me and what’s in it for us.”

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