EMILY KWONG, HOST:
The Trump administration announced this past week that it has entered talks with the Cook Islands to research and develop seabed mineral resources. The Polynesian archipelago is one of only a handful of countries worldwide that has begun permitting this type of exploration called deep-sea mining. Now, deep-sea mining is not regulated. There's no blueprint for how to do it safely nor responsibly, which is why, for the last decade, the U.N.'s International Seabed Authority has worked to draw up regulations. But President Trump and one Canadian company have posed a question - why wait? Here to tell us more is Beth Orcutt. She's an oceanographer and the vice president for research at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in East Boothbay, Maine. Beth, welcome.
BETH ORCUTT: Thank you for having me.
KWONG: I want to start by descending in an imaginary submarine to travel to the deep sea. Where is this part of the ocean? What does it look like and what lives there?
ORCUTT: The deep sea is a fascinating place to get to explore. I feel so lucky to have been able to go down to the deep sea and other parts of the Pacific Ocean. When you first get in the submarine or use a robot, you go through the sunlit ocean. You see fish. You see sharks. You see stuff like that. But then you start to descend into the twilight zone and then into the part of the ocean that becomes completely dark. No sunlight gets down there. And you start seeing life that communicates with light. They flash bioluminescence at each other to either attract prey or warn off things. And then...
KWONG: Wow.
ORCUTT: ...Eventually, you reach the bottom. And it feels, I think, like going to another planet might feel like (laughter). It's a totally crazy, exciting world full of interesting animals and interesting processes. I mean, really, it's stuff that sci-fi is built from.
KWONG: So the International Seabed Authority does not have a permitting process for mining in international waters yet. They keep saying they're going to create one. They keep pushing back the deadline, wanting more science to be done before really defining those regulations. And the company at the center of this debate - The Metals Company's basically said, look, we're tired of waiting. CEO Gerard Barron defends applying for a U.S. permit. What do you make of the U.S. striking out alone like this, as a scientist who studies the deep sea?
ORCUTT: Yeah, so as a scientist, the concerns I've raised at the International Seabed Authority and that I also would raise in this context - if the U.S. pursues this - is that all actors need to ensure the effective protection of the marine environment. Knowing that we're effectively protecting it requires having good scientific information in terms of - what's the natural variability of the systems? How do they function? How do they respond to perturbation? Can you fix it if you mess it up?
And right now, we don't have good information to answer those questions. And so it makes our ability to ensure effective protection very difficult, no matter who is the regulator, whether it's the United States or the international body. And importantly, there are different steps. There's the exploration stage and then the exploitation stage. And between those two, companies should do what's called test mining and, you know, look at the environmental impact of those tests.
KWONG: Has anything been revealed from your research on how microscopic life in the deep sea thrives in this very dark, very extreme environment and how deep-sea mining might impact that life?
ORCUTT: There is a lot of scientific information from not just me, but many of my colleagues.
KWONG: Yeah.
ORCUTT: So some of the most well-known work has looked at sites that had nodules. The nodules were removed, kind of, like, by dredging them out of the way. And another team of scientists went back decades later, and not only had animals not come back to those environments that - especially the animals that attach to rocks, but even the microbes that can grow much faster were still not there. They were still much lower in concentration, and the processes that they perform were still lower. And so the available data suggests that it will take decades if not centuries, if even longer, for the nodules and the animals that live on nodules to be able to recover once mining takes place.
KWONG: These nodules are, of course, small rock-like lumps on the ocean floor that contain the minerals that are wanted for these products, yeah?
ORCUTT: Correct. Yeah, so these are kind of like potato-sized black pieces of rock. They're mostly manganese oxide, but they co-precipitate other metals. And that's what the interest is in those nodules, is the other metals that are co-precipitated.
KWONG: Why does it matter that in these test mining sites, the animals aren't coming back?
ORCUTT: So most of the animals in those environments attach to the rocks. Those are things like deep-sea corals, sponges, deep-sea anemone, and they provide habitat for all other kinds of life. And there are animals that dive to the depths of the ocean to get food (laughter). So they're performing very essential services to supporting those ecosystems.
There are also, potentially, reservoirs of genetic discovery. Right now, there are new drugs and new biotech products that are being created from marine sponges and other marine organisms. And we're just tapping the surface of what the genetic diversity is in the deep sea. So there could potentially be new solutions that come from the diversity of life that's down there.
KWONG: Yeah. I mean, the deep sea is such a mysterious place in a lot of respects. It's - scientists have mapped less than 25% of the deep-sea floor, I believe. And just like you're saying, new discoveries are being made all the time. And you're making me think about some research that an international team led by Andrew Sweetman discovered recently that those nodules, these lumps on the ocean floor, that they - at least in the area that he was studying - were producing oxygen, no photosynthesis required. And they called it dark oxygen. What do you make of the discovery of dark oxygen within these nodules? And why is that important to the conversation around deep-sea mining and pulling them up?
ORCUTT: Yeah, the recent discovery that there may be oxygen production on nodule surfaces is really interesting in, first, showing what we maybe don't know about how these ecosystems function and that there's whole new processes that might be occurring down in the deep sea that we haven't seen before. If that process is occurring - and there needs to be more research to really document it - that means that there could be extra energy sources for microbes that live in those environments. That might also mean that they're giving off different chemical cues to the animals to figure out, hey, come sit here on this nodule, maybe. We don't know. And so it highlights that we still have more to understand about how these deep, dark, high-pressure, low-temperature ecosystems function.
And while it may be mysterious to us, it's important to remember that this is the majority of the Earth (laughter), right? The oceans cover so much of our planet, which means so much of our planet is the deep sea. And so if we don't even know these very basic questions, we really just have so much to discover.
KWONG: Beth Orcutt is an oceanographer and the vice president for research at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in East Boothbay, Maine. Thanks so much, Beth.
ORCUTT: Thank you so much.
KWONG: For more ocean science, check out Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR, and especially our new series Sea Camp. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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