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The world's first deep-sea mining robots are poised to rip into rich deposits of copper, gold, and silver 1,600 meters down at the bottom of the Bismarck Sea, near Papua New Guinea. The massive machines, which are to be tested sometime in 2016, are part of a high-stakes gamble for the Toronto-based mining company Nautilus Minerals.
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The mining robots were built for Nautilus by Soil Machine Dynamics, based in the United Kingdom, which supplies construction equipment for laying undersea cables, servicing offshore oil platforms, and other heavy-duty deep-sea jobs. The main robots are a pair of tractor-trailer-size excavators. One uses 4-meter-wide counterrotating heads studded with tungsten carbide picks to chew through the metal-rich chimneys that form around superhot water spewing from sulfurous vents in the seafloor. Its partner adds brute strength, using a studded drum that is 2.5 meters in diameter and 4 meters wide to pulverize rock walls.Dredge pumps built into these machines will push the smashed ore back to a central pile on the seafloor, where a third Nautilus robot will feed a slurry of crushed rock and water up a pipe dangling from the production vessel. There the water will be wrung out from the ore, which will be loaded on another ship and carried to China for processing.
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Assuming all goes well, the robotic diggers will spend 30 months scouring the Solwara 1 site, bringing up 2.5 million metric tons of ore containing metals worth more than US $1.5 billion at today's prices. Next, the robots will likely set to work on one of Nautilus's 18 other prospects in the Bismarck Sea or one of its 19 discoveries off the shores of the Polynesian archipelago of Tonga.
seaQuest DSV can't be too far behind.
(Score: 4, Informative) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday December 24 2015, @09:27AM
Man, I'd almost forgotten all about Soil Machine Dynamics. A friend of mine was their roadie back in the early eighties. He was the one who dressed Terry "The Dong" Donn as a hotel maid in order to sneak out of the Hanoi Hilton following the infamous Brown Trombone incident of '83.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by garfiejas on Thursday December 24 2015, @10:28AM
I thought these places were unique scientific sites with extremely fragile ecosystems, that support even more fragile ecosystems around them. Given the low, low prices of copper see http://www.kitcometals.com/charts/copper_historical_large.html [kitcometals.com] and commodities in general, makes me wonder how much damage they'll do, before it goes belly up.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 24 2015, @12:24PM
The vents migrate, so cold vents (the ones with the most resources) have little/no life around them.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NoMaster on Thursday December 24 2015, @12:49PM
I'm more interested in what happens with the gangue after the ore is pumped to the surface and separated. Are they going to pump it back down and stabilise it if necessary so it doesn't cause too much problems, or does it just get pumped out the back of the production platform to pollute and hypernutrient a huge swathe of shallow ocean?
Live free or fuck off and take your naïve Libertarian fantasies with you...
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Thursday December 24 2015, @06:02PM
I'm more interested in what happens with the gangue after the ore is pumped to the surface and separated.
What do you think will happen? They'll leave it on ground in a giant pile.
Anyway, they will not start operations until at least 2018...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Gravis on Thursday December 24 2015, @06:22PM
these idiots are bringing wholesale destruction to an environment they barely know anything about and for what, some shiny metal?!
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday December 24 2015, @11:44PM
don't worry, the program will be scrapped soon after the bot parses the market price of gold and begins to haggle.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 25 2015, @03:58AM
You didn't have to write "assuming all goes well".
(Score: 2) by martyb on Friday December 25 2015, @05:36PM
Maybe you didn't notice, but that was a direct quote from the article. As it was published on the IEEE [ieee.org] (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) web site, I suggest that if you perceive advocacy, you take it up with them.
Wit is intellect, dancing.