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Japanese researchers have mapped vast reserves of rare earth elements in deep-sea mud, enough to feed global demand on a "semi-infinite basis," according to a new study.
The deposit, found within Japan's exclusive economic zone waters, contains more than 16 million tons of the elements needed to build high-tech products ranging from mobile phones to electric vehicles, according to the study, released Tuesday in the journal Scientific Reports.
[...] The finding extrapolates that a 2,500-sq. km region off the southern Japanese island should contain 16 million tons of the valuable elements, and "has the potential to supply these metals on a semi-infinite basis to the world," the study said.
The area reserves offer "great potential as ore deposits for some of the most critically important elements in modern society," it said.
The report said there were hundreds of years of reserves of most of the rare earths in the area surveyed.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @05:18PM (1 child)
I'm not convinced that mining the sea floor is remotely as bad as mining anything on dry land. First, there's just not that much on the seafloor in most places; hurting coral reefs is bad of course, but those only exist offshore at relatively shallow depths, not out in the open ocean. And while we certainly are overfishing, the sea floor itself is not the home of the stuff we eat. Finally, roughly 3/4 of the Earth's surface is covered by water, so when we mine on land, we're screwing up the 1/4 of the planet that really matters the most to us, both ecologically and as far as being a place where we want to inhabit. If we're going to mine a place on this planet, mining the sea floor (away from reefs) seems like the least-bad option.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Tuesday April 17 2018, @09:56PM
We didn't realise the effects of mining on land until we'd been doing it for quite a while (we've been mining clay since the literal stone age), and we probably still don't realise all of them. I can't tell you what we'll fuck up on the ocean floor, but it could be way worse. I doubt the effects will be contained at the depths of mining, and most of our biosphere resides in the ocean in general.
That isn't to say we shouldn't mine the ocean; from a certain perspective we're an entropy engine that becomes more efficient over time. There are no shoulds, but turning rocks into processors seems pretty cool. There is the risk that we'll fuck up an ancient equilibrium by killing way to much plankton or something, causing a chain of extinctions that could include humanity, thus making us (the planet) radically less effective at producing entropy. That wouldn't seem so cool, so we might want to proceed with caution.