Amitava Mukherjee
(The author is a senior journalist and commentator.)
In the midst of the hullabaloo over the Iran-Israel war, something very serious has gone largely unnoticed in the international arena. Donald Trump, the US President, has issued an executive order authorising mining companies to carry out seabed mining in international waters. Like Trump himself, the order is a mark of incongruities. One can issue executive orders when the matter falls within his own jurisdiction legally. But the vast oceanic waters are common properties of all countries. Any attempt to violate this principle is sure to bring chaos and disorder.
In pursuance of the definition given by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS), international law stipulates that each coastal country will have an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) that grants the coastal nation certain rights over a defined area of ocean extending 200 nautical miles from its baseline. Within this zone the coastal state has sovereign rights for the purpose of exploring, exploiting, conserving, and managing natural resources, both living and non-living. As per this law, the US has rights of exploitation only in its own EEZ, both in the Atlantic and in the Pacific Oceans.
Then why is Donald Trump trying to extend his jurisdiction over all the oceans of the world?
It is because some crucial minerals are high in demand. Their demand will increase in coming days as they are suited for emerging technologies. In particular these minerals are lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese, and some other rare earth elements. Secondly, China enjoys almost near total control over some of them. For example, China is the largest processor of cobalt in the world and the second biggest processor of nickel after Indonesia. All of the above-mentioned minerals are vital for defence systems, clean energy production, electric vehicles, and many others. This is enough to rattle Trump. He is determined to secure a continuous supply of such critical minerals for America and break the “foreign adversary control” over them. By “foreign adversary control,” he means China.
The items in focus are polymetallic nodules, or egg-shaped small rocks, which litter ocean floors. They contain strategic minerals mentioned above. The richest area containing such nodules is the Clarion-Clipperton Zone in the North Pacific. This region alone covers an area measuring 4.5 million square kilometres and is estimated to contain 21 billion tonnes of such nodules. In fact, each littoral country has such nodules under ocean waters falling within the jurisdiction of its EEZ, where mining is going on for research and prospecting purposes. However, vast amounts of such small rocks are lying under international waters. Big business opportunities await here. Several deep-sea mining companies are girding up their loins for jumping into the fray. Already the Metals Company of Canada has applied to the US authorities for a license.
But what will be the modus operandi for such mining operations? The nodules are lying at a depth of 5500 metres beneath sea waters. So, remote-controlled vehicles are being developed for such operations. Mining companies assert that operations will be light touch. Robotic hands will scoop up the nodules from the seabed, and they will be transported to remote-controlled surface-level vehicles through pipes. But huge amounts of sediments will also come up during the operation, and they will be ultimately thrown back into the sea.
Here lies the problem. Still, we know very little about the oceanic underwater world. Till a little while back we had an idea that it is dark and cold there and it is devoid of life. Now the entire impression has changed. We now know that tens of thousands of kinds of life exist there. Only in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone lying beneath the Pacific Ocean have five thousand kinds of life, entirely new to science, been discovered in recent times. Deep sea operations will smother and destroy them. Machine operations will produce tremendous whirl and a good amount of light and heat beneath ocean waters, which are dark and cool. The tens of thousands of species living therein have acclimatised themselves to this deep-water atmosphere spanning ages. These species are slow to germinate. They take ages to be born and grow. Deep sea mining will totally jeopardise their existence pattern. Moreover, the huge amounts of sediments will also be warm, and they will be thrown into the seas over large areas, doing great harm to marine fishing. Experts are of the opinion that deep-sea mining may harm ocean waters’ capability to absorb and store carbon dioxide, which is the greatest polluter of earth’s environment.
It is obvious that deep-sea mining companies have their lobbyists in the Republican Party of the US. Donald Trump himself seems to be a votary of such a controversial endeavour. They have their own arguments. It is a fact that much more biomass is in place in the tropical forest at Sulawesi, Indonesia, one of the world’s most heavily mined places for nickel extraction, than what is there in the depth of the ocean. Mining interests therefore say that deep sea mining will thus destroy much less of the environment.
Environmentalists, however, argue that biomass is not the only criterion. Here they have a point. Life slowly clicks down in the depth of the sea. Organisms there take ages to reproduce. Minerals like nickel, cobalt, and manganese accumulate only a few millimetres per million years in the nodules. It is better to admit that science still knows very little of the oceanic underworld scenario. In fact, 90 percent of life in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone is unknown to us.
Deep sea mining ventures are nothing new. It was first tried in 1970 by a US company named Deepsea Ventures, which rummaged through the Blake Plateau, a part of a submerged mountain range off the coast of North Carolina, United States. Fifty-two years later, in 2022, another expedition was sent to the same area to gauge the effects of the previous expedition. It was found that the train track-like dredge line left by the 1970 expedition lay vivid and fresh. There was no sign of life, no nodules, and no biodiversity. It proves that life once destroyed beneath sea waters will take ages to recover.
So what is the way out? The world needs critical minerals. Still, we have plenty of them overland. But their exploitation means destruction of biomass, which saves us from the clutches of carbon dioxide. An alternative supply source is the seabed. But casting avaricious looks at the nodules lying there may bring equal disaster. So the best solution lies in the recycling of minerals. According to an International Energy Agency estimate, recycling can bring down the need for freshly mined minerals by 40 percent for copper and nickel and 25 percent for lithium and cobalt by 2050.