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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Around 500 miles southeast of the bright turquoise waters at Honolulu Harbor, and two and a half miles down to the dark ocean floor, a massive carpet of potato-sized rocks stretches thousands of miles on the seabed. These rocks, called polymetallic, or manganese, nodules, are made up of manganese, nickel, copper, and cobalt. The nodules' growth is one of the slowest geological processes in the world—it takes millions of years for one to grow a couple of millimeters: Tiny particles precipitate from the surface of the ocean to the seafloor and conglomerate around a core, like a rock or a shark tooth, and create a nodule.
[...] They are now the precious targets, worth millions of dollars, of an emerging deep-sea mining industry, and that's making many researchers like Craig Smith, a professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, cautious. As the head of the Smith Lab, he focuses on the seafloor ecology of various habitats, including the abyssal plains, which cover 50 percent of Earth's surface. "We assume that it is likely that more species occur in the deep sea than anywhere else on Earth," the authors of one paper wrote.
"To pick up nodules, a mining machine, kind of like a potato harvester, would come along and dig up sediment. This would disrupt the top 10 to 15 centimeters of sediment, which is most of the habitat of the seafloor," Smith tells me. "Nodule mining, because of its vastness and the slowness for the environment to recover, is basically an instantaneous wipeout of a community and ecosystem."
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by janrinok on Saturday December 03 2016, @09:21AM
Can I explain this in less that 140 chars? Certainly not. However, those precious metals are not just precious because they can be used for jewelry or extravagant decoration. They have important uses in electronics and many other everyday items that we almost take for granted. How does this help create jobs?
Well, by having technology solve today's problems we might be able to bring farming to areas that are currently uneconomic, or allow existing farming to become more efficient. Crops have to be transported to where they are needed, either for consumption or for processing, and if we can do that more efficiently you can import less and become more self-sustaining, or bring costs down so that more people can afford to live decently again. Those things that you have in abundance can be moved to where there is a market, either internally or be exported. Manufacturing - which currently is being outsourced - might become more efficient and thus economic again. As communications improve it becomes easier to base your services in areas that are attractive places to live and raise families, rather than trying to shoe-horn yet more into the already crowded cities.
All of these can create jobs, perhaps not the same jobs that regions have had for decades or even centuries, but jobs nevertheless. Creating jobs creates even more jobs - homes and infrastructure have to be built, transport hubs have to be integrated into the national system, communications have to exist. But if your thinking is constrained by what you have done in the past, then you are doomed to live in the past. Science and technology are not simply ways of learning more - but are enablers for our very existence.
Having said all that, a quick and dirty method of collecting precious metals that helps destroy our most important asset - the planet itself - is only going to make a handful of people rich. Better to solve the problems of extracting these metals without destroying an ecosystem that we do not yet understand and therefore cannot know its importance. But that is where governments can serve the people rather than just the few. Government needs bright people and forward thinkers. If you have chosen a government that is limited to 140 chars then your prediction might well be correct.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 03 2016, @09:27AM
Obsessed with dolphin poop SAD. #JobsForAmericanMiners #DrillBabyDrill
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 03 2016, @09:28AM
a quick and dirty method of collecting precious metals that helps destroy our most important asset - the planet itself - is only going to make a handful of people rich
Rule of Acquisition #102: Nature decays, but latinum lasts forever.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 03 2016, @10:37PM
Should be easy to use a metal detector to find the metal nodules without disturbing the sea floor. Then the mining machine digs them up, one at a time, minimal disturbance. Might even take less power than tilling or plowing-up the whole sea bed? Also, by not disturbing the whole area, there is a better chance that vision systems (video) will work, instead of being blinded by floating silt.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @08:53AM
That the nodules aren't like Coral Beds, and are actually a foundation of the ecosystem itself, which is very likely given that mineral deposition like that is often the foundation of undersea communities, whether through thermal vents, mineral buildup, or biological growth and accumulation.