Undersea Mining Opens Up New Can of Worms

A new gold rush is on, but the miners aren’t clawing at the earth with dynamite, picks and shovels--they’re trolling the ocean floor with submarines and remote-controlled cameras.

Prospectors and scientists hope to strike it rich by dragging up gold, silver and other minerals from the seabed off Papua New Guinea, mining formations with names like “Satanic Mills,” “Roman Ruins” and “Snowcap.”

If they do, they will have beaten the odds that defeated previous miners who expected to get rich off deep-sea manganese nodules in the 1970s, or to exploit Antarctica for oil and minerals until a mining ban was adopted there.

They also are facing environmental and scientific objections that mining could despoil unique geological wonders that have led to bizarre evolutionary adaptations of deep-sea animals like blind shrimp and giant tube worms.

But the sites proposed for mining are all within Papua New Guinea’s territorial waters, exempting them from any international controls.

Nautilus Minerals Corp., registered in Papua New Guinea and run by Australians, hopes to reap billions of dollars by mining “black smokers”--underwater volcanic vents that belch out superheated clouds of mineral-laden fluid.

When the minerals hit the cold seawater, they coalesce into gold, silver, copper, lead and other metals.

The black smokers form a hellish underwater landscape. Scientists using submarines and robot cameras have dubbed one active field of smokers the “Satanic Mills.” Another group of ragged columns thrusting from the seabed is known as the “Roman Ruins.” “Snowcap” is a hill crowned with white bacteria digesting rich nutrients spewing from the smokers.

Australia’s federal science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific Industrial Research Organization, helped find the metal deposits in the waters off Papua New Guinea’s northern coast, working with researchers from the United States, Canada, Germany, Japan and Papua New Guinea.

They were initially studying how rich landlocked ore deposits like those at Broken Hill and Mount Isa in Australia originally formed eons ago when those sites were under the sea.

“The deposits are exceptionally rich in copper and gold,” said Ray Binns, an official with the Australian science agency.

Samples brought up from one deposit averaged a very rich 10% copper and 26% zinc and had 15 grams of gold and 200 grams of silver per metric ton, he said. Another deposit yielded 15% copper and 3% zinc and 21 grams of gold and 130 grams of silver.

“If you found this deposit on dry land, you’d call these bonanza figures. They could change the economics of sea-floor mining and cause it to be taken seriously,” Binns said.

The chief executive of Nautilus, Julian Malnic, said the gold and other mineral deposits found 3,900 to 5,600 feet deep in the Manus Basin of the Bismarck Sea had excited him since the first samples were brought up in 1993.

“They were utterly compelling. And the fact we now have title to the deposits has galvanized the scientists and mining industry into seeing the possibilities,” Malnic said.

Nautilus received mining licenses on Nov. 28 for two tracts covering more than 1,930 square miles of Papua New Guinea’s seabed. The company now must raise investment capital and figure out how to recover the minerals.

Some experts see the mining industry going the way of the oil industry, which began on land but is now increasingly tapping undersea deposits.

“Fields like this make the prospect of undersea mining look economic,” Binns said. “It is already technically feasible and, in one sense, it is cheaper than mining on land because you don’t need fixed infrastructure as you do on a terrestrial mine. Hauling the ore from the depths of the sea is no harder in theory than hauling it up from deep underground.”

South African companies have pulled up diamonds from shallow offshore waters, mining areas where rivers carried the gems down into the sea.

In the 1970s, industrial nations wrangled with poor countries over mining rights in international waters to deep-sea manganese nodules, which also contain cobalt and nickel. Debate on a “Law of the Sea” treaty dragged on long after mining companies shelved the idea of deep-sea nodule mining as unprofitable.

Nautilus and Australia’s science agency say the deposits they are prospecting are in much shallower, more accessible waters than the ocean-bottom manganese nodules.

Alfred Simpson, director of the Fiji-based South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission, noted Nautilus is connected with the developers of the huge Lihir gold mine in Papua New Guinea, “So they are not cranks.”

But he said he didn’t think the company would start mining in the next year or two. “I wouldn’t be rushing out to buy shares,” he said.

What concerns Simpson’s commission and other research agencies is that the “black smokers” are host to exotic species often previously unknown to science.

“These could be of greater significance and value than the mineral aspects. What we are worried about is mining companies getting in before we have thoroughly researched these areas. We could lose a lot of information if we go into mining too quickly,” Simpson said.

He said more smokers had been detected in the North Fiji Basin and between Fiji and Tonga, although at far greater depths.

He also said onshore locations of manganese, copper, nickel, gold and cobalt at Boise Bay, Canada, should be sufficient to cheaply supply world demand for many years. But Japan, China, South Korea and India are investing heavily in research and technology to locate and recover nodules from the beds of the Indian and Pacific oceans, he added.

“One has to ask why, and the answer has to be for strategic reasons. They feel they have no guaranteed access to shore deposits of such strategic minerals,” Simpson said. “That is why they are spending big money. Are they crazy? Their motive has little to do with cost.”