(subtle music)
(water bubbling) - [Cory] There's a conflict brewing at the bottom of the ocean. In the coming decade, it will
play out thousands of feet down in deep dark expanses of sea floor. On one side of the battle are unique and alien like creatures:
giant tube worms, yeti crabs, dandelion like jellyfish colonies and on the other side, bizarrely, our cell phones, TV's, wind
turbines, modern technology. In a real way, those two interests may end up fighting over
one of the most mysterious and dramatic environments
on earth, this one. Okay, so this is clearly a model. We don't have a submarine
so we built this instead. You know what I just realized? There are no plants down there. They don't exist. Thanks to modern electronics,
there's an overwhelming demand for some very particular
chemical elements. Gold is used constantly
in computer circuitry. Nickel, Manganese, Zinc and
Cobalt are needed for batteries and Copper is crucial to
countless kinds of wiring. Worldwide, humans mined around
20 million tonnes of Copper in 2017 and those are just a few examples. The point is elements like
these power the modern world. Many of these precious metals are sourced from massive terrestrial mines but while we chip away
at our reserves on land, some entrepreneurs have been gaming out a very different source
of precious minerals. In the deep dark of the sea floor, 10 or even 15 thousand feet down shifting tectonic plates create fissures in the Earth's crust and allow hot magma to seep close to the sea bed. If the conditions are just right, sea water percolates through the crust, becomes a super heated mineral rich fluid and shoots back into the ocean. These sites are called hydrothermal vents and for the few people who
have actually seen them in person, they are almost beyond words. - It's hard to describe what it's like to go down in a submersible which I've done a fair number of times and
you're arriving on the bottom and you're at this mid ocean ridge where there's brand new
rock that's been formed. It's basalt, it's black and it's mostly not much living on it at all. - Dr. Verena Tunnicliffe is a professor and former sea floor adventurer at the University of Victoria. - You're driving along
and all of a sudden, you come into a hydrothermal vent and there is just going from
black nothing to all of this white microbial production and
all of the animals around it. Temperatures up to 400 degrees centigrade so you've got these big chimneys that are formed from the minerals and it's just covered with life. - The first critters to take up shop here are chemosynthetic microbes. Amazingly, they derive energy
from chemical reactions, not the sun and they love the vents. - So you've got lots of microbes that are producing like mad, it's food. Now you've got lots of
animals then coming in because there's food and therefore, lots and lots of animals
that want to eat that food. - Researchers estimate that there may be 600 larger active vents
sprinkled along mid-ocean ridges and each one can support its
own unique vibrant ecosystem. Researchers like Verena
have cataloged new species of sea cucumbers, foot long
white clams, squid worms. For biologists, it's an
embarrassment of riches. - Frankly, it's very
easy to find new species at hot vents and I have lost track. I know that we've done at least
a hundred through the lab. - But in addition to
life, there are minerals. As water passes through these systems, a complex set of chemical reactions leach minerals out of the rock. When the fluids spew back
out into the cold sea water, the minerals separate out
again littering the sea floor with Gold, Copper, Zinc,
Manganese and more. There is a theoretical
fortune to be made down here and that hasn't been ignored. In 2017, Japan announced that
it had completed a landmark trial mining operation
near the island of Okinawa. The mining site was an
inactive vent meaning that it was no longer spewing
out hydrothermal fluid. It was really just baby steps
towards full scale mining but it spooked conservationists because mining a hydrothermal vent really means destroying it. - So they have to go in,
they have to cut out the rock and then they have to
grind it up into a slurry and the slurry is pumped to the surface. So the habitat is destroyed,
the animals are gone, the habitat is converted from big chimneys with lots of niches into mud. - In some cases, vents
are naturally resilient. Those that form in
volcanically active areas are constantly destroyed and reformed and the animals there have
adapted to that volatility. Verena likened them to new growth forests that bounce back quickly after wild fires. But the sites most valuable for miners are mature stable vents. The minerals there built
up over thousands of years. - The rocks that are
deposited by the vents have taken thousands to tens of thousands and even more years to deposit and form. Those habitats are very stable so those are your old growth forms. - The animals there aren't adapted
to catastrophic disruption and could be wiped out by mining. For all that, vents are
probably not in imminent danger. First, if sea floor mining
really kicks into high gear, it likely will not start
with hydrothermal vents. There are other valuable sources
of minerals in the ocean. Many are found within rocky
lumpy masses called nodules. Those are scattered across wide
flat plains on the sea floor and they may prove easier
and cheaper to harvest which is the bottom line
of any mining effort. - Financing, financing, financing. Deep sea mining is going to be expensive. And that's one of the lessons
of the Japanese experiment is that "boy, this is hard." - Conn Nugent is the director of the Pew seabed mining project. It's a group that
advocates from regulation and conservation of the seafloor. As scary as active vent mining sounds, he suspects that it may end up being more trouble than it's worth. - It would be really hard
to conduct exploitation in an active zone
because it's so darn hot. You'd have to devise machineries
and delivery system's and riser systems to withstand
scalding temperatures. - The hope is that regulation
will come into effect before seabed mining of any
kind becomes affordable. The International Seabed
authority is a governing body that spun out of the United Nations and it's working to get a
"mining code" enacted by 2020. In the meantime, concerned
scientists have come forward to propose criteria for
creating "no-mining" zones. For Conn, this would be historic. - Really, this is the first opportunity in which regulations can be written to govern exploitation
activity before it begins. You know, can you imagine if in 1859, there were oil drilling regs? (chuckles) It might have been helpful, you know. We had to go through quite
a bit of trial and error and we're still going through quite a bit of trial and error in governing that. - The demand for the minerals
that power electronics isn't going anywhere and
ignoring deep sea mining would mean committing more
fully to terrestrial mines. We know what that looks
like and it isn't pretty. So, some amount of seabed mining might make sense in the future. - Go look at a pit mine. Go look and see how Cobalt is removed from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. So, that's the green argument for deep sea mining and it has validity. - But when it comes to active sea vents, there's so much left to learn and study. So, even if they're safe for now, advocates like Conn and Verena would like them to stay that way. - So now is the time to write protections and a key protection is no
mining ever in active vent zones. That's the barroom brawl that
we're willing to enter into. (water gurgling) - This is all they had. (chuckles) (water splashing)
The "entrepreneurs" seeking to destroy ocean ecosystems for profit need to be shot and killed before this happens.
If some company figures this out, its the perfect crime. Far away from civilization, in a place very few people will look. And probably crazy difficult to enforce regulation.
Still, i wonder how it would compare to a relatively passive site that just filters sea water using renewable energy at the surface where its also easy to service. I suppose minerals tend to sink though...
Edit: Maybe a huge pipe that goes down to the sea floor where heaters create a convection current upwards? Heaters could be solar powered. We have pipes that can hang 2.3 miles down, right?