I was sitting in the bathroom reading last months (NOV 2012) Popular Science (TMI?) when I ran across an article that said a company called Nautilus Minerals will begin remote mining of the sea floor by the end of next year. This strikes me as a somewhat iffy endeavor. The article focused on the machines that will be used for this large-scale mining operation. It looks like they are going to be removing, crushing and sorting the entire ocean floor. If they were on land I think their method could be accurately called strip mining. I thought we were past officially condoning this sort of approach to get at the Earths riches. One of the machines pictured, called a bulk cutter, has a large cutting drum, think of a steamroller with cutters, for tearing up anything that gets in its way and a tube sticking out back for debris. I keep thinking of the black smokers and the new forms of life that have been discovered near them which have hardly been studied at all. These black smokers are good at bringing up minerals from the depths of the Earth and it seems this would make the areas around them particularly rich in valuable minerals. Based on the track record of mining companies on land I am thinking this could be a terrible environmental disaster. After all the trouble and expense these companies have gone to in order to make this real I don't see them giving up just because of horrible consequences down the road. On land mining has caused a lot of problems for people and in the depths of the ocean, with no one to witness misdeeds or be affected directly by the chemicals and byproducts, there is a lot of room for plausible deniability. When more companies start heading to the ocean floor they can all point fingers and say, "It must have been them because nothing is more important to us than safety". The first site, approximately the size of 21 football fields, holds as much as 3 billion dollars in minerals. People are killed every day for a lot less. Good luck ocean life, you will need it.
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