#international seabed authority

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Hakai Magazine:

Earlier this year, Leticia Carvalho, a Brazilian oceanographer and environmental policy expert, took the helm of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) as secretary general. The ISA, an intergovernmental body that governs what happens on the seafloor in international waters, is responsible for an area that spans more than half the planet.

One of the agency’s key roles is in deciding the future of deep-sea mining, a nascent industry targeting tennis ball–sized rocks called polymetallic nodules. Rich in cobalt, nickel, and other valuable metals, polymetallic nodules can be found in some areas of the seafloor, most notably in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a vast tract between Hawai‘i and Mexico.

In a landslide victory, Carvalho unseated Michael Lodge, an English lawyer who had served as the ISA’s secretary general since 2016. Lodge’s tenure at the international body—which is tasked with the contradictory goals of both helping deep-sea mining get off the ground and keeping it in check—was marred by allegations of bribery, corruption, and of Lodge having an undue bias toward the mining companies the ISA oversees, all of which Lodge has vehemently denied. Many environmentalists and scientists welcomed the news of Lodge’s displacement.

In the wake of her win, Carvalho told Mongabay that she aims to rebuild trust in the ISA, and in Politico she said she planned to investigate the corruption and mismanagement allegations. But Carvalho’s term does not seem set to bring about the kinds of sweeping changes that would satisfy the 32 countries that have called for a pause on the development of deep-sea mining—including Canada, New Zealand, and Costa Rica—or those, like France, pushing for an outright ban.

For years after the ISA’s inception in 1996, environmentalists, mining industry representatives, and government delegates gathered at the agency’s seaside headquarters in Kingston, Jamaica, to develop the Mining Code—the set of rules and regulations that will govern everything about deep-sea mining from who is allowed to mine to how they will mine, and even the way the industry’s proceeds will be disbursed to, somehow, benefit all of humanity. For 25 years, deep-sea mining was a distant reality. Negotiations were easygoing, and those gathered in Jamaica would mingle at weekend retreats and dance parties.

All that changed in 2021 when representatives from Nauru, a Pacific Island nation, triggered a clause in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) known as the “two-year rule.” The move meant that, suddenly, the ISA had only two years to either finish the Mining Code or consider a company’s application to exploit the seafloor with whatever unfinished rules it happened to have in place.

Three years later, no company has yet applied for an exploitation permit. But the triggering of the two-year rule sparked a flurry of contentious debates over the legal and environmental implications of deep-sea mining. With so much still under discussion, Julian Jackson, an ocean governance expert from the nonprofit Pew Charitable Trusts who has closely followed the negotiations, says the Mining Code is still months—or even years—from being finished.

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Brazil’s Carvalho to lead seabed-mining authority following predecessor’s controversial term

Brazilian oceanographer Leticia Carvalho will be the next secretary-general of the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the U.N.-mandated organization that oversees deep-sea mining activities in international waters.

She won the election with 79 votes, while her predecessor, 64-year-old Michael Lodge, who served as the ISA’s secretary-general for two terms, received only 34 votes.

Lodge has previously been accused of siding with mining companies, which went against the duty of the ISA secretariat to remain neutral and may have influenced the direction of the prospective deep-sea mining industry.

Carvalho previously told Mongabay that she would work to make the ISA more transparent and rebuild trust within the organization.

Continue reading.

[thepastisalreadywritten]

PARIS - Scientists warned on Tuesday (February 14) that controversial seabed mining could significantly threaten ocean ecosystems and especially affect blue whales and other cetaceans already stressed by shipping, pollution and climate change.

A study in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science found that commercial-scale extraction of valuable minerals from the ocean floor, which could begin for the first time later this year, would damage habitats and interfere with the way cetaceans communicate.

Earlier research has detailed the likely destructive impact of deep-sea mining on the ocean floor.

The new analysis by the University of Exeter and Greenpeace Research Laboratories shifts the spotlight to marine megafauna and noise pollution.

"Cetaceans rely on sound for every aspect of their behaviour, such as foraging, breeding and navigation," Kirsten Thompson, the lead author of the study and a lecturer in marine mammal biology at the University of Exeter, told AFP.

"That's why noise pollution from deep seabed mining is a particular concern."

The report points to overlap between the frequencies at which cetaceans communicate and the sound that would be generated by drilling, dredging and the acoustic telemetry needed to remotely operate vehicles mining the seabed.

This phenomenon, called "auditory masking," has been previously shown to interfere with the communications of marine mammals and to alter their behaviour.

Underwater noise generated by industrial or military operations can induce foraging whales to surface more quickly than normal, increasing the risk of gas bubbles forming in the bloodstream, which can in turn lead to stranding and death.

Other research has found that man-made noise increased the risk of separation between humpback whales and their calves, which communicate via quiet vocalisations.

"TWO-YEAR RULE"

The new findings come with some caveats.

Because seabed mining has yet to be authorised anywhere in the oceans, Thompson and her team did not have real-world data to draw from.

They thus used proxies from other industries to estimate the expected sound from industrial seabed mining operations.

Thompson also pointed to knowledge gaps in the distribution of marine mammal species, mainly due to the high cost of biological surveys across vast expanses of ocean.

The impact of deep-sea mining on cetaceans is predicted to be particularly acute in the Pacific Ocean's Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a habitat for about two dozen cetacean species, including baleen whales, beaked whales, sperm whales, and Risso's dolphins.

The region is poised to become home to the world's largest extraction of manganese nodules - deposits which contain metals used in electric car batteries.

The tiny island nation of Nauru, in particular, sees deep-sea mining as a potentially lucrative income stream for climate adaptation in the face of sea level rise and increasingly powerful storms.

In June 2021, the Nauru government triggered a rule requiring the International Seabed Authority (ISA) - the United Nations body governing deep-sea exploration and exploitation in areas beyond national jurisdiction - to finalise regulations for high-seas mining worldwide within two years.

According to this so-called "two-year rule," mining could go ahead in July this year with whatever regulations the ISA has formulated by that time.

"Given the imminent threat that the two-year rule presents to ocean conservation, we suggest there is no time to waste," said Thompson.

Source: AFP/kg

[head-post]

Finland boards oil tanker suspected of cutting off internet, power cable

Finnish authorities seized a vessel in the Baltic Sea on suspicion of disconnecting an underwater power cable connecting Finland and Estonia and damaging four internet lines.

The Cook Islands-registered vessel, Eagle S, was arrested on Thursday, 26 December, by the Finnish Coast Guard, Robin Lardot, director of the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation, reported.

From our side we are investigating grave sabotage. According to our understanding, an anchor of the vessel that is under investigation has caused the damage.

Two fibre-optic cables owned by Finnish operator Elisa and linking Finland and Estonia were severed. The third link between the two countries, belonging to the Chinese company Citic, was also damaged.

The fourth internet cable running between Finland and Germany, owned by Finnish group Cinia, is also suspected to have been severed. The incident highlighted the need for close international co-operation, with the US and NATO expressing their readiness to support the Finnish-Estonian investigation.

The two countries held extraordinary meetings to assess the situation on Thursday, according to separate statements. The Baltic Sea states are on high alert for potential acts of sabotage after a series of cable disruptions since 2022.

Repairs to the 170-kilometre Estlink 2 interconnector would take several months, with the outage raising the risk of power outages in winter, operator Fingrid said. Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal, however, emphasised that the country would have sufficient access to electricity.

The Eagle S Panamax oil tanker crossed the Estlink 2 electric cable on Wednesday. Damage to underwater facilities in the Baltic Sea became so frequent that it was hard to believe that it had been caused by a mere accident, Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna said.

We must understand that damage to submarine infrastructure has become more systematic and thus must be regarded as attacks against our vital structures.

Lithuanian Foreign Minister Kęstutis Budrys also said that the growing number of incidents in the Baltic Sea should serve as a warning to NATO and the European Union to step up protection of underwater infrastructure in the region.

The Nord Stream pipeline from Russia to Germany, which runs along the seabed in the same waters, was blown up in 2022. The case is still under investigation in Germany.

Read more HERE

[cee-sees-the-sea]

One thing i really like about studying deep ocean science is that a lot of the terminology I encounter just makes me feel like a wizard. Oh, what am I doing for my end of year project? Studying abyssal polychaete worms. Oh and they came from one of the many Abyssal Plains across the seabed? The same ones we discovered special metals from that produce "Dark Oxygen"? Oh ok.

In all seriousness though abyssal plains, ridges, etc, just the general seabed is really important part of the wider marine ecosystem as a whole, and I think that as a (hopefully soon graduated) scientist I have a vague ethical duty to inform people about them.

The Clarion-Clipperton Zone is a stretch of seafloor across the Pacific ocean. Divided into various sections and overseen by the International Seabed Authority, it regularly faces consideration by various international bodies for deep-ocean mining claims. The reason for this is because of these small, potato-sized clumps of precious metals that sit on the seabed. They have the exact mix of metals to act as batteries, and produce oxygen in the lightless to near-lightless depth of the Abyssal zone via electrolysis. This is INSANE for a number of reasons but my personal favourite is its implications for the origin of life, which previously where thought to have been most probably possible via anerobic chemosynthetic means. We could be looking at the cauldron of life and deciding to take it apart for (very expensively margined) electric cars, basically.

[thunderbirds-showdown]

Which Thunderbirds Are Go episode is better?

Vote on which episode you think is better. Episode synopses below the cut.

Up from the Depths Part 1: Deep in the Mariana Trench a survey team encounter the TV-21, a prototype Thunderbird vehicle that was flown by Jeff Tracy, when a systems failure causes the ship to be stranded on the seabed. International Rescue arrives to rescue the crew but the Mechanic suddenly takes control of the surveyor and uses it to crush Thunderbird 4. Gordon gets out just as his ship is destroyed and now must use the TV-21 to rescue the crew. Meanwhile, Lady Penelope and Parker are investigating into how the Hood is communicating with the Mechanic.

Extraction: A seismologist and his son alert the authorities to the presence of a rogue wildcat mining operation, only for the machinery to trigger an earthquake that swallows the equipment – along with the father and son. Gordon must attempt a daring underground rescue of the boy and his injured father, while Virgil has to find a way to shut down the out-of-control rig.

[loneberry]

A sea lily marine animal on the sea floor of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone at a depth of 4,800m

“The deepest parts of the Pacific Ocean have rested undisturbed for millennia. But now creatures living thousands of metres beneath the surface may be confronted by new visitors: companies mining minerals key to the green energy transition.

“The International Seabed Authority (ISA), the UN-backed regulator, is preparing to consider the world’s first commercial deep-sea mining application as soon as July, despite many member states warning it is too soon for extraction to leap from land into water.”

///

“Ecological treasures on the seabed include creatures such as the transparent ghost fish, dumbo octopus and giant sea anemone, as well as microscopic worms that scientists say could hold the key to understanding human evolution.”

“The Clarion-Clipperton Zone in the Pacific Ocean, where most exploration has taken place, is ‘one of the most biodiverse sedimented marine habitats on our planet’.”

“Environmentalists say the plume of waste water emitted by deep-sea mining machinery could disturb ‘marine snow’, or carbon and nutrient-rich particles of biological matter, that usually settles on the seabed. Noise pollution may also disturb marine mammals.”

“Deep-sea ecosystems ‘take millennia to establish and can take seconds to destroy’, said Tony Worby, a marine scientist at Australian non-profit Minderoo Foundation. ‘We’re playing with fire to think we can go down to the deep sea and strip-mine it without massive repercussions.’”

.

.

Capitalism is becoming post-terrestrial. The next stage of primitive accumulation is beginning—there’s currently a scramble for mineral resources in the deep seas…all in the name of the bullshit ideology known as “green capitalism.”

My heart breaks thinking about all the ways we abuse our precious oceans.

Rachel Carson has this to say about marine snow:

“When I think of the floor of the deep sea, the single, overwhelming fact that possesses my imagination is the accumulation of sediments. I see always the steady, unremitting, downward drift of materials from above, flake upon flake, layer upon layer—a drift that has continued for hundreds of millions of years, that will go on as long as there are seas and continents.

“For the sediments are the materials of the most stupendous ‘snowfall’ the earth has ever seen.”

“The sediments are a sort of epic poem of the earth.”

(Read the entire chapter “The Long Snowfall” in The Sea Around Us—it is breathtakingly beautiful.)

Now imagine, instead of that gentle silent accrual of marine snow, you have plumes of industrial waste and the infernal racket of machines in a world where so many creatures use sound to orient themselves. It makes me sick.

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

Record breaking recovery of rocks that originated in Earth’s mantle

Scientists have recovered the first long section of rocks that originated in the Earth’s mantle, the layer below the crust and the planet’s largest component.

The rocks will help unravel the mantle’s role in the origins of life on Earth, the volcanic activity generated when it melts, and how it drives the global cycles of important elements such as carbon and hydrogen, according to the team.

The nearly continuous 1,268 metres of mantle rock was recovered from a “tectonic window,” a section of the seabed where rocks from the mantle were exposed along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, during Expedition 399 “Building Blocks of Life, Atlantis Massif” of the ocean drilling vessel JOIDES Resolution in Spring 2023.

With attempts dating back to the early 1960s, the recovery was a record-breaking achievement led by the International Ocean Discovery Program, an international marine research consortium of more than 20 countries that retrieves cores—cylindrical samples of sediment and rock—from the ocean floor to study Earth’s history.

Since then, the expedition team has been compiling an inventory of the recovered mantle rocks to understand their composition, structure and context.

Their findings, presented in the journal Science, reveal a more extensive history of melting in the recovered rocks than expected.

Lead author Professor Johan Lissenberg from Cardiff University’s School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, said: “When we recovered the rocks last year, it was a major achievement in the history of the Earth sciences, but, more than that, its value is in what the cores of mantle rocks could tell us about the makeup and evolution of our planet.

“Our study begins to look at the composition of the mantle by documenting the mineralogy of the recovered rocks, as well as their chemical makeup.

“Our results differ from what we expected. There is a lot less of the mineral pyroxene in the rocks, and the rocks have got very high concentrations of magnesium, both of which results from much higher amounts of melting than what we would have predicted.”

This melting occurred as the mantle rose from the deeper parts of the Earth towards the surface.

Results from further analysis of this process could have major implications for the understanding of how magma is formed and leads to volcanism, the researchers claim.

“We also found channels through which melt was transported through the mantle, and so we are able to track the fate of magma after it is formed and travels upwards to the Earth’s surface.

“This is important because it tells us how the mantle melts and feeds volcanoes, particularly those on the ocean floor that account for the majority of volcanism on Earth. Having access to these mantle rocks will allow us to make the connection between the volcanoes and the ultimate source of their magmas.”

The study also provides initial results on how olivine, an abundant mineral in mantle rocks, reacts with seawater, leading to a series of chemical reactions that produce hydrogen and other molecules that can fuel life.

Scientists believe this might have been one of the underpinning processes in the origin of life on Earth.

Dr Susan Q Lang, an associate scientist in Geology and Geophysics at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who was a co-chief scientist on the expedition and part of a team continuing to analyse rock and fluid samples, said: “The rocks that were present on early Earth bear a closer resemblance to those we retrieved during this expedition than the more common rocks that make up our continents today.

“Analysing them gives us a critical view into the chemical and physical environments that would have been present early in Earth’s history, and that could have provided a consistent source of fuel and favorable conditions over geologically long timeframes to have hosted the earliest forms of life.”

The international team of more than 30 scientists from the JOIDES Resolution expedition will continue their research on the recovered drill cores to address a wide range of problems.

Dr. Andrew McCaig, an Associate Professor in the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds, who was the lead proponent of Expedition 399 and a co-chief scientist on the Expedition added: “Everyone involved in Expedition 399, starting with the first proposal in 2018, can be proud of the achievements documented in this paper. Our new deep hole will be a type section for decades to come in disciplines as diverse as melting processes in the mantle, chemical exchange between rocks and the ocean, organic geochemistry and microbiology. All data from the expedition will be fully available, an exemplar of how international science should be conducted.”

TOP IMAGE....The researchers say the rocks recovered from the mantle bear a closer resemblance to those that were present on early Earth rather than the more common rocks that make up our continents today. Credit Professor Johan Lissenberg

LOWER IMAGE....Expedition 399 “Building Blocks of Life, Atlantis Massif” of the ocean drilling vessel JOIDES Resolution which recovered the 1,268m of near continuous mantle rock in Spring 2023. Credit Thomas Ronge (Exp. 399, JRSO_IODP)

[orallech]

Wait wait it’s actually so funny the U.S is not a part of the international seabed authority

[mariacallous]

In satellite pictures, they look like the pale blue and gray eggs of a giant butterfly, laid in tight patterns on some dismal leaf. The eggs, made of steel, are tanks brimming with radioactive fluid—contaminated water from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant. The water will soon be diluted and pumped into the sea. Núria Casacuberta Arola, of ETH Zürich, is among those who will be watching. Closely.

“We have access to a ship that goes to the coast of Fukushima every year, sometimes once, sometimes twice,” she says. Casacuberta Arola and her colleagues regularly drop an assembly of jars into waters near the incapacitated power plant to collect samples at different depths. The lids of the jars close automatically, one by one, as the device is slowly pulled back up to the surface.

By doing this, and also taking sediment samples from the seabed, they hope to be able to tell in the coming months and years whether the disposal of water from Fukushima is causing a noticeable rise in radiation in this corner of the Pacific Ocean. The water release could start as early as next month. If there is a significant bump in radiation levels in the surrounding waters, it will mean things have gone very wrong.

In 2011, a massive tsunami struck Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. The defensive sea wall intended to protect the plant from such an onslaught was many meters too low to stop the monster wave. Seawater flooded the facility, ultimately leading to partial meltdowns and huge explosions at some of the reactors. It is considered one of the worst nuclear accidents in history.

In the years since, workers have had to constantly pump water into Fukushima’s stricken reactors, which still contain hot nuclear fuel. This water has, thankfully, done its job of keeping the reactors cool, but it has become irradiated in the process, meaning it can’t just be flushed away. Workers have kept the used cooling water on-site, building tank after tank in which to store it. All the while, they have known that they will eventually have to dispose of it. Today, there are 1.3 million metric tons of contaminated water on-site. And no space for any more tanks. The time to do something about it is here.

It has taken years of research, modeling, and sampling, but earlier this month the International Atomic Energy Agency gave its approval for a discharge plan. Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority signed off on the proposals at the same time, meaning that the Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco), which is in charge of the plant and its cleanup, has full authority to begin slowly releasing the water into the ocean via a 1-km-long underwater pipe.

Some aren’t happy. Local fishers are strongly opposed to the plan, and there have been street protests in South Korea. Yet many scientists are highly confident that the discharge will be perfectly safe.

The contaminated water, enough to fill more than 30,000 fuel-truck semi-trailers, contains a mix of unstable chemical elements, known as radionuclides, that emit radiation. To keep these radioactive components to a minimum, Tepco has installed special water purification technology that treats the water before storage. In essence, it involves passing the contaminated water through a series of chambers containing materials that can adsorb radionuclides. The isotopes stick to those materials and the water flows on, a little cleaner than before.

However, it is not 100 percent effective, and many of the radionuclides it’s designed to extract, such as the isotopes caesium-137 and strontium-90, for example, can still be found in the stored water. There are also some isotopes the system can’t remove at all, such as carbon-14 and tritium, a form of hydrogen with two neutrons and one proton in its nucleus (hydrogen usually contains just one proton).

Despite this, the water is extremely safe because the concentrations of radionuclides are so low, explains Jim Smith, a professor of environmental science at the University of Portsmouth. “I’m not concerned,” he says of the plan to discharge the water.

Many of the above radioactive isotopes were released into the ocean at the time of the disaster in 2011—and some traveled. One study found them floating around 3,000 km away in the Arctic Ocean six years after the accident. Once the discharge begins, radionuclides will undoubtedly spread out into the Pacific, but this is very unlikely to have a noticeable effect on the environment, Smith says.

For context, he points out that he has many years of experience studying the effects of radiation on living things near the destroyed nuclear power plant in Chernobyl. Even there, where exposure to radiation is much greater, the impact appears to be tiny. “We know radiation damages DNA, probably there are subtle effects of radiation at these levels, but we don’t generally see a significant effect on the ecosystem,” he says, referring to that work.

Plus, tritium—one of the isotopes that can’t be removed from the stored water—is already present all around us at low concentrations, though higher levels are associated with nuclear-related activities. The authors of one 2018 study speculated that unusually high levels of tritium in the Rhône river delta in France were down to historical pollution from the watchmaking industry—tritium has been used to make glow-in-the-dark paint for watch dials.

What many people don’t realize is that water containing tritium is actually routinely released into the sea—sometimes in vastly greater quantities than are to be discharged from Fukushima—by nuclear facilities all around the world, including in the US, Europe, and East Asia. The Cap de la Hague nuclear processing site in France releases 11,400 terabecquerels (Tbq) of tritium every year, which is more than 13 times the total radioactivity of the tritium across every storage tank at Fukushima.

Tepco is regularly testing the stored water ahead of the release, the company says. The water will be re-treated, multiple times if necessary, and diluted more than 100 times to bring its tritium radioactivity concentration down to no more than 0.0000000015 TBq per liter, a level equivalent to a 1/40 of Japan’s national safety standards. Roughly 70 percent of the stored water also contains radionuclides other than tritium that are at concentrations exceeding regulatory limits, says the Japanese government—levels of these will also be brought down to below Japan’s regulatory standards. The water will then be tested again before being discharged.

For a final point of comparison, Smith calculates that cosmic rays interacting with the Earth’s atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean annually cause the natural deposition of 2,000 times more tritium than will be introduced by the gradual Fukushima release.

Tatsujiro Suzuki at Nagasaki University remembers watching in horror as the disaster unfolded back in 2011. “We all thought that this kind of thing would never happen in Japan,” he says. At the time, he was working for the government. He recalls the confusion over what was happening to the reactors in the days following the tsunami. Everyone was gripped by fear.

“Once you experience that kind of accident, you don’t want to see another one,” he says. The long shadow cast by the disaster means that, for the water release plan, the stakes—at least in terms of public trust—could not be higher.

Suzuki argues that it’s not quite fair to compare the Fukushima water to fluids discharged from other nuclear facilities elsewhere in the world because of the challenge of cleaning up the many different radionuclides here. “This is an unprecedented event, we have not done this before,” he says, adding that he thinks the procedure is “probably safe” but that there is still room for human error or an accident, such as another tsunami, that could cause an uncontrolled release of the water into the sea.

Tepco and the International Atomic Energy Agency have considered such possibilities and still judge the risk to human and marine life to be extremely low. Sameh Melhem, now at the World Nuclear Association, formerly worked for the Atomic Energy Agency and was involved in some of the research to evaluate the discharge plan. “I think it’s very safe for the operators themselves and also for the public,” he says, adding: “The radionuclide concentrations coming from this release, it’s negligible.”

Last November, Casacuberta Arola and her colleagues collected samples of seawater off the coast of Fukushima, and they have recently begun to analyze them. The scientists measure the levels of various radionuclides that might be present. For tritium, that means removing all helium from the sample and waiting to see how much new helium emerges from the water as a product of radioactivity. This makes it possible to extrapolate the amount of tritium that must be present, explains Casacuberta Arola. She and her team have records of radionuclide measurements like this from the sea off Fukushima going back years.

“We already know that the values that we see now close to Fukushima are close to the background values,” she says. If that changes, they should find out fairly quickly. As will the International Atomic Energy Agency and other observers, who, separately, intend to sample water and wildlife in the area in the coming years to keep an eye on things.

Smith says that despite overwhelming evidence that the water release will be entirely safe and heavily scrutinized at every turn, it is not surprising that some people are skeptical of the plan. They have a right to be, he adds, given the troubled history of the plant.

At the same time, the threat posed by the release—even in a worst-case scenario where everything goes wrong—is miniscule compared to some of the other environmental risks in the region, such as the effects of the climate crisis on the Pacific Ocean, Smith says.

Casacuberta Arola agrees. Negative coverage of the discharge plan has been used to “brainwash” people, she argues, and to instill fear against the nuclear energy industry. “To me,” she adds, “it’s been very much exaggerated.”

[lady-silver-ice]

Sadly these guys are endangered because they've only been found at three hydrothermal vents in the Indian Ocean, and potential habitat is at most 0.27 square km. These vents are prime targets for deep sea mining, and the International Seabed Authority has granted commercial mining licenses for two of them. No conservation measures are planned or in place.

All hail Volcano Snail

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Hakai Magazine:

When Arvid Pardo, a Maltese diplomat, took the floor at the United Nations General Assembly in New York in 1967 and began speaking at length on international law, the room was sparsely populated. Pardo was undeterred.

The deep, dark ocean, he said, is the womb of life. “We still bear in our bodies—in our blood, in the salty bitterness of our tears—the marks of this remote past.” With technology fast progressing, “man, the present dominator of the emerged earth, is now returning to the ocean depths. His penetration of the deep could mark the beginning of the end for man, and indeed for life as we know it on this Earth; it could also be a unique opportunity to lay solid foundations for a peaceful and increasingly prosperous future for all peoples.”

Pardo argued that the deep seafloor falls outside the territory of any state. As humanity raced to exploit the “immeasurable wealth” already known to be hiding there, Pardo said that wealth should be viewed as the common heritage of humankind.

At a time when countries around the world were grappling with the Cold War along with the lingering consequences of colonization and exploitative resource extraction, Pardo’s treatise struck a nerve. After all, who should have access to the deep? Who should benefit from its wealth?

His speech—later characterized by historians as a “you should have been there” moment—set the stage for nearly a decade of negotiations. Eventually, those discussions resulted in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) containing this language: that any industrial activity on the international seafloor must “be carried out for the benefit of mankind as a whole.”

Today, with deep-sea mining companies closing in on mineral-rich rocks called polymetallic nodules, policymakers at the International Seabed Authority (ISA)—the intergovernmental body that governs activities on the seafloor in international waters—are still grappling with the challenge passed down by Pardo. If the resources on the international seafloor are the common heritage of humankind, as UNCLOS states they are, then what, exactly, does that mean? With little to no precedent to rely on, and with the reality of deep-sea mining inching ever closer, the ISA and its member states are in the process of figuring out how to make deep-sea mining work for all of humanity.

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Deep-Sea Mining: Why Leticia Carvalho Is Running in the International Seabed Authority Leadership Election

For a vast stretch of the planet’s last untouched frontier, one of the world’s most important elections will take place later this month—and it’s one that you’ve probably never heard of.

That’s because this frontier lies thousands of feet below the ocean’s surface, where the seafloor holds riches: lost shipwrecks, buried chests of gold, sunken cities. But these shadowy depths also conceal a different kind of treasure: a potential mother lode of the battery minerals that some mining companies and countries are desperate to seize.

They can’t exploit them—yet—as seabed mining in international waters is currently prohibited. But a little-known agency affiliated with the United Nations is working furiously to write the rulebook for the nascent, and controversial, industry. Depending on whom you ask, it’s a venture that could wreak havoc on unknown ecosystems; produce the necessary minerals to power the global energy transition; or help world powers wrest control of China-free critical mineral supply chains. Billions of dollars, of course, are also at stake.

Leticia Carvalho, a Brazilian oceanographer, wants to lead the obscure yet powerful organization at the heart of these debates.

Continue reading.

[hoursofreading]

Whatever the challenges were that President Obiang found so insurmountable when it came to providing potable water or education or roads or basic democracy to his citizens, he found all the authority and organization he needed to make it easy for oil producers to do business in his country. There was a very clear path to winning the right to drill off the coast of Equatorial Guinea, and it ran right through the Presidential Palace in Malabo. “In a place like Equatorial Guinea,” that longtime industry watcher, Ken Silverstein, explained in an interview with Mother Jones magazine, “it’s whoever figures out how to give the president and his inner circle the most money, gets the contract.” And that is how the black gold, the excrement of the devil, the natural resources—whatever you want to call it—the giant pots of oil under the seabed in Equatorial Guinea ended up producing giant pots of money for the Obiang family. Start with an already ruthless dictator divorced from international norms and unmoved by opprobrium for his human rights record. Now add oil company bribes and oil revenues to make that dictator suddenly wildly wealthy, with billions of dollars’ worth of new incentives to not just hold on to power but hold on to every single lever of power in the country, to ensure the continued flow of oil revenue directly to and through him, with no political competitors horning in on the action. And bingo, the God-given resources of an entire nation become the private wealth of one family.

Rachel Maddow