--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: I'm Ayesha Rascoe. This is a Sunday story from Up First, where we go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story. Today, we're going really deep, and I mean really deep, basically to the bottom of the ocean. There's been a lot of attention lately on a new mineral frontier in the dark depths of the sea. More and more commercial mining interests have their eyes on the seabed floor as an untapped source of minerals essential to powering our green energy future.
--:-- [Sound effects: Ocean waves]
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: So far, very few companies have been granted rights to mine the seafloor. But recently, Willem Marks, a reporter in the UK, was invited to witness one of the mining operations in action. Here he is describing a moment standing on the stern of a huge mining vessel as it brought up a massive chunk of ocean floor.
--:-- Willem Marks: This huge grabbing device, like a giant metal claw, comes out of the water. It's travelled a mile up from the seabed. It's filled with tons of rock and silt, and yet you can see the jaws haven't really closed. And I suddenly realise, as I see the water dripping out, there are little bits of rock falling out as well. And it's been falling out all the way up on the journey.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Willem Marks joins me now. Welcome to the podcast.
--:-- Willem Marks: Hey, Aisha.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: So, Willem, given the sensitivities around sea mining, I have to wonder, like, how did you get this front row seat on an exploratory mining vessel?
--:-- Willem Marks: Well, it's kind of a crazy story. It started out last year. I was working on a piece about the Titan. That's the submersible that kind of imploded close to the Titanic wreck. And as my reporting continued, I went to this small island off the south coast of the UK called Jersey. I met someone there who'd been involved through his company and efforts to rescue that submersible, and over the course of the day talking, he mentioned something which he said at the time, you know, I probably shouldn't be talking to you about this, but it was that he was working on subsea underwater mining in Papua New Guinea.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: And so he and you stayed in touch?
--:-- Willem Marks: Yes, I was immediately interested in trying to understand what that looked like. And a few months later, he said his vessel was heading out there. He said, if you want to join us, we'll be there for a few weeks, just figure out dates that work.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: And up to this point, you know, deep sea mining, just to take a step back, it's been really pretty theoretical as far as people like me are aware. There's been a fair amount of exploratory work and kind of an effort to try and understand what the economics would look like. But that's often been done relatively quietly, relatively privately.
--:-- Willem Marks: Exactly.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: And so, of course, I did want to join. And so I ended up booking flights going via Singapore from London onto the capital of Papua New Guinea, Port Moresby, then catching another local flight to another island, driving across that island for four hours or so, waiting on a beach in the middle of nowhere. And eventually, after some time, this catamaran kind of belching smoke out the back appears over the horizon. It's kind of a local ferry. And it takes you to the vessel.
--:-- Willem Marks: That's right.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: So you finally get on this giant ship. What's happening on board? Like, what does it look like?
--:-- Willem Marks: It's 270 feet long. It towers above the water when you first board it. It's got several decks. And you've got a massive amount of machinery. You've got these winches, you've got cranes, a couple of these remotely operated vehicles, these kind of huge huboid machines that go 6,000 meters deep if they need to. And they're all on the back of this massive deck, often moving around at times throughout the day, throughout the night.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: The vessel's a couple of hours away from the shore, as I mentioned, and it's really sticking in one place. The engines, the thrusters around the outside of the vessel are often firing at different moments to keep it to the millimetre almost in one position as they work several miles or at least a mile deep beneath them.
--:-- Willem Marks: Exactly.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: But they're not like mining, right? They're doing like a test.
--:-- Willem Marks: So they're not doing full-scale, long-term industrial mining. What they were doing this summer was essentially carving out chunks of the seabed beneath the vessel in dimensions 10 meters by 10 meters to kind of get a cross-sectional analysis of the ore, the rock, that they want to mine from at a much larger scale in the future.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: So they're bringing some of the, I guess, the seafloor that they're digging up. What are they doing with the rest of it?
--:-- Willem Marks: Well, this is what was so surprising to me, because they told me they had permits to extract 180 tons of this rock from the seafloor for analysis, which will be carried out in laboratories in Australia, which is not that far away from Papua New Guinea, but it's still a fair old haul. And then probably five to ten times as much as they're bringing on deck they're digging up and then depositing just a few yards away in these kinds of stockpiles.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: And what are you guys doing that for?
--:-- Willem Marks: They said we hope that when we come back it'll make it much faster to mine it later on. And since this device they're using to pull it up on deck goes up and down a mile or so each time. It makes sense to do a lot of it down at that depth while they're down there before yanking it up each time, which they did every 12 hours or so.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: And it's basically a giant claw. Like, I'm imagining like one of those machines that, you know, my kids use where you go down and you're trying to get the toy out of a machine.
--:-- Willem Marks: Yeah, it's like that scene in Toy Story.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Yeah. Exactly that.
--:-- Willem Marks: Where they're sending this down on this huge winch next to the kind of the claw, the grabbing device. They've then got this underwater vehicle and that attaches itself onto the claw to help guide it. And so once they've maneuvered the claw into the position they want to grab some of the seafloor, it just yanks shut. And once they got it securely fastened inside the jaws of that claw that grabber it goes up to the surface a mile above.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: But I know like with the toys claws a lot falls out. It doesn't hold. So is this is this holding like all the ground that it picks up or is there stuff falling out?
--:-- Willem Marks: It's a good question. And so, you know, we had a limited time on board. It's hard for me to talk about every single time this happened. But given that while we were there, this claw was coming up every 12 hours, they spent a lot of time making sure that the load inside the jaws of it were securely fastened before they moved it. But at least one occasion, I saw that it hadn't fully locked closed.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: It's hard to see down there. It's dark. There's a lot of kind of silt swirling around.
--:-- Willem Marks: And by the time it got to the surface on one occasion, it was clear that the jaws hadn't locked and a lot of the stuff inside had fallen out on the way up to the surface.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: You're listening to The Sunday Story. We'll be right back.
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--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: We're back with Willem Marks talking about deep sea mining and his recent trip to Papua New Guinea to watch a high-tech deep sea mining operation at work.
--:-- Willem Marks: You're talking here about disrupting the ground, the seafloor, and stuff potentially falling from the claw as it comes up from the earth. Big mounds of seafloor disrupted, and then they're left in these big piles.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: So all of this, to me, sounds very disruptive to ocean ecosystems. I would imagine that's a real concern.
--:-- Willem Marks: It is, and not just amongst climate activists, but also amongst many of the scientists who've looked at the feasibility of deep sea mining.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: And this has been an industry that's been studied for quite some time, even though it's not yet really taken off.
--:-- Willem Marks: There are two ways to sort of think about this. One is the disruption right on the surface. And in this kind of deposit they're looking primarily for copper, bit of gold, bit of silver. The rock that forms the bed there of the seafloor is rich in these metals because essentially it's come out of the earth's crust.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: And then the second concern is about what happens as this material travels to the surface. If you're working with a mile deep ocean or a two mile deep ocean or even deeper in some cases, there's the scale of that material falling out even gradually over that distance.
--:-- Willem Marks: And then once you have currents, it could potentially blanket large areas of the ocean floor elsewhere. And that has the potential, scientists say, to then choke marine life, whether that's coral or other forms of plants or animals.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: I mean, you're talking about potential damage, but no one really knows yet what the damage may be. So how do you figure out the impact that doing even just these tests is having on the ecosystem?
--:-- Willem Marks: They had environmental scientists on board who every time they sent this device up and down from the surface to the seafloor, they would put out these devices and it allows them to test what's happening in the seawater at different depths beneath the ship.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: And the intention of these environmental scientists was to figure out exactly how damaging this may or may not be. So this will all be part of the kind of examination, the data analysis this company does, in theory, alongside regulators and government officials from Papua New Guinea to decide whether this is something that can move forward.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: You say in theory alongside regulators. So I'm wondering, are government officials in Papua New Guinea monitoring what's going on in their waters?
--:-- Willem Marks: Well, to be totally honest, I found it to be pretty messy. No one really seemed to know the fact that the vessel was there.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: I went looking back in the capital, Port Moresby, for some answers and a bit of a better understanding about how this entire industry was shaping up and being regulated in Papua New Guinea.
--:-- Willem Marks: I tried to chase down the head of the country's environment agency. But I eventually got hold of a man called Jerry Gary on Zoom. He runs the mining regulatory authority for Papua New Guinea.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: And he told me that any mining vessel that was operating in Papua New Guinea's territorial waters would definitely have officials from his agency on board to monitor what they're doing.
--:-- Willem Marks: And I pointed out I'd just been on a vessel a couple of days earlier, none of his officials had been on board. And this is what he said.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: If they are in the country and if they have not informed us, then I don't think one of our offices would be there. So that would be a concern.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: So right now, do you know that the vessel is in the country?
--:-- Willem Marks: I am not aware of the vessel in the country.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: And yet you're managing director of the Mineral Resources Authority.
--:-- Willem Marks: I am.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: You're right. I will deal with the proponent now that you told me.
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--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: We're back with Willem Marks talking about deep sea mining and his recent trip to Papua New Guinea to watch a high-tech deep sea mining operation at work.
--:-- Willem Marks: So you have a government in disarray, a local population fighting to save what they see as their way of life and a company looking to exploit these resources. It's really messy.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Does Papua New Guinea have a strategy moving forward?
--:-- Willem Marks: Well, in some ways, this will depend on what this company involved decides to do. You know, if they think this is not going to make them money, and therefore isn't worth it, they may walk away.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: But that seems unlikely.
--:-- Willem Marks: The government has a financial stake in this effort. And that's really important to be aware of. They invested money many years ago in this idea.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: And officials there are concerned about recouping that investment in a country that doesn't tend to have a huge amount of spare money.
--:-- Willem Marks: Elsewhere in the world where this has theoretically been given approval, countries like Norway, Japan, and the Cook Islands, things are moving really slowly.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: The effort in Norway has been tied up in litigation for many months. In Japan, they're moving really cautiously, looking at the science before moving ahead.
--:-- Willem Marks: And in the Cook Islands, they're still quite early on in terms of their analysis of whether this will be a good idea or not.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Those are really the only places on earth where this is being considered genuinely at the moment.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: So let's step away from Papua New Guinea and these other countries where, you know, mining in territorial waters is possibly on the horizon. I understand that most of the actual interest in seabed mining is in international waters.
--:-- Willem Marks: Yes, you have these parts of the ocean worldwide that have these massive and rich amounts of rare minerals and metals.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Some of them are like these deposits in Papua New Guinea. And then you have other types of deposits on the seafloor, these kind of nodules that sit around on the seafloor and can be relatively easily picked up.
--:-- Willem Marks: They're very rich in some of the minerals and rare metals that are of interest to companies worldwide.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Until really recently, we didn't have the technology to reach some of these places that are, you know, miles deep in places like the Pacific Ocean.
--:-- Willem Marks: But now because of the advent of these remote-controlled vehicles, these incredibly strong winches that can move things like these grabbing devices down there, this is all becoming a lot more accessible.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: So with everything that you've learned from this reporting trip that started from someone telling you, I shouldn't be saying this, but we're doing this thing. How are you thinking about deep sea mining right now?
--:-- Willem Marks: There are arguments for and against, like many of these things. We need, as a species, to reduce carbon emissions, right? No one really questions that.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: And one way to do that is to transition the way that we generate and use energy into techniques that are less likely to emit carbon molecules into our atmosphere.
--:-- Willem Marks: And one way of doing that is using electric vehicles, let's say. They need huge amounts of material, more than we know we have on Earth right now.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: So if everyone's going to drive an electric car one day, let alone everyone in developing nations that don't even have cars yet, and I'm talking 30, 40, 50 years down the road, how are we going to develop those technologies without stuff, material, metals, minerals?
--:-- Willem Marks: If that is needed, where is it going to come from?
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: But then you balance that with this idea that these activities could have huge damaging impacts on environments we don't really understand in the deep sea.
--:-- Willem Marks: And we don't really understand what those deep sea environments mean for our broader atmosphere, for instance. That really is concerning.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: This was a story again about powerful people and powerless people. You go to these local villages, those people don't feel they have a voice, they don't feel like they're being listened to, they don't feel like they're even being seen.
--:-- Willem Marks: And then you have outside investors, outside engineers, outside companies operating over the horizon doing work that's not being broadcast or published or talked about and is certainly not sharing their information with those local communities or even necessarily with all of the local government officials.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: You end up having that, what I think of as an informational inequality.
--:-- Willem Marks: It really does strike me as something that needs strong global coordination, particularly if we're going to move into international waters, deep sea mining.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: And part of that will obviously focus on ensuring that local communities benefit from this kind of activity if it does go ahead as much as some of the billionaires involved in it.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Well, Willem, thank you so much for sharing your reporting with us today.
--:-- Willem Marks: Thanks so much for having me, Aisha.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: This episode was produced by Andrew Mambo. It was edited by Jenny Schmidt. Kweisi Lee was our engineer. It was fact-checked by Greta Pittinger. The Sunday Story team includes Justine Yan and Kim Naderfein-Pietersa. Our supervising producer is Liana Simstrom and Irene Noguchi is our executive producer.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: I'm Aisha Roscoe. Up first, we'll be back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, enjoy the rest of your weekend.
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