{"id":348,"date":"2014-10-21T11:07:00","date_gmt":"2014-10-21T11:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=348"},"modified":"2014-10-21T11:07:00","modified_gmt":"2014-10-21T11:07:00","slug":"drive-to-mine-the-deep-sea-raises-concerns-over-impacts-by-mike-ives-yale-environment-360","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=348","title":{"rendered":"Drive to Mine the Deep Sea Raises Concerns Over Impacts by Mike Ives: Yale Environment 360"},"content":{"rendered":"

Drive to Mine the Deep Sea Raises Concerns Over Impacts by Mike Ives: Yale Environment 360<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For years, the idea of prospecting for potentially rich deposits of minerals on the ocean floor was little more than a pipe dream. Extractive equipment<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

View Gallery<\/strong>
\n\"hydrothermal<\/a><\/p>\n

Nautilus Minerals<\/div>\n
Hydrothermal vents create rich mineral deposits that companies are eager to exploit.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

was not sophisticated or cost-effective enough for harsh environments thousands of feet beneath the ocean\u2019s surface, and mining companies were busy exploring mineral deposits on land. But the emergence of advanced technologies specifically designed to plumb the remote seabed\u2014 along with declining mineral quality at many existing terrestrial mines \u2014 is nudging the industry closer to a new and, for some environmentalists and ocean scientists, worrying frontier.<\/p>\n

More than two-dozen permits have been issued for mineral prospecting in international waters. And in April, after years of false starts, a Canadian mining company\u00a0signed<\/a>\u00a0an agreement with the government of Papua New Guinea to mine for\u00a0copper and gold<\/a>\u00a0in its territorial waters. That company, Nautilus Minerals, plans to begin testing its equipment next year in European waters, according to the\u00a0International Seabed Authority<\/a>\u00a0(ISA), a regulatory agency established in 1994 under the auspices of the United Nations. A Nautilus spokesman, John Elias, said the plan is to award a construction contract in November for a specialized mining vessel. \u201cAll other equipment has been manufactured and is in final assembly,\u201d he wrote in an email.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

…click on the link above to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Drive to Mine the Deep Sea Raises Concerns Over Impacts by Mike Ives: Yale Environment 360. For years, the idea of prospecting for potentially rich deposits of minerals on the ocean floor was little more than a pipe dream. Extractive equipment View Gallery Nautilus Minerals Hydrothermal vents create rich mineral deposits that companies are eager […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[197,198,531],"class_list":["post-348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-deep-sea","tag-deep-sea-mining","tag-mineral-extraction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=348"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}