 This is ThinkTech Hawaii, the immunity matters here. Bingo. Yeah. I'm Jay Fidel. This is ThinkTech. This is Research in Manoa, R-I-M, and it's the one o'clock block on a given Monday. Well, Monday. Okay. Now, we have a special guest we want to show off. Okay. And she is Dr. Philamine Perlon. She is a professor at the School of Ocean Earth Science and Technology, a visiting colleague, if you will, at the School of Ocean Earth Science and Technology in UH Manoa. And she's also from Imperial College in the UK. Right? You get that right? That's where I got my doctorate. Okay. What's your visiting from where? I'm visiting from London in the UK. Okay. Where I live. Okay. I mean, given all the trouble in London these days, I can understand why you want to be here for a little while. That's not at all why I'm here. I don't approve of winters in London. Ah, simple. Nothing complicated or scientific about that. Nope. So you spoke just a week ago at the Science Cafe, which is part of the Hawaii Academy of Science, and you spoke about deep-sea mining, which I think attracted a lot of people because they wanted to know about that, because it's an intersection between science, especially the science of ocean science, and business, and mining, mining, mining. And technology. This is think tech. All of this connects. And I think the average person, I'm sorry I wasn't there, I was tied up that day, but the average person would like to know more about that because it bespeaks of the future, the future in so many ways, especially economic and multinational and political. And that's why I want to tell everybody the scary part. The scary part is that Philharmonia is also a lawyer. Uh-oh. I ran away to sea later. Why did you do that? Well, the sort of law I was doing was international trade based in Europe, the former Treaty of Rome. I became rather frustrated with the direction that was taking, and revisited my career decisions when my law firm, which was completely wonderful, offered me a partnership and thought that I would actually like to return to my first love, which was marine science, which I did. But now it's come a combination, isn't it? Completely. It could not have been more useful to still have that law degree. Can you describe that connection for me, the combination and how it works for you? Yes, with pleasure, because I hope it might inspire other people when they want to revisit their careers that they don't need to throw away an entire degree. They might make it work for them. Marine science is governed by an international treaty called the Law of the Sea Convention. And marine science, and in fact all marine activities or activities on land, which is not very well known, that affect the marine environment is governed by this treaty. So those of you who are thinking about carbon dioxide emissions, for example, yes, it is covered, and it is being comprehensively ignored by the international community. However, we're here to talk about marine mining. When I decided to go back and become completely qualified in oceanography, which meant to go up to the PhD level, I became really, really interested in deep sea manganese crusts and nodules. Now, these are ocean precipitates that are found in the deep sea. They drop to the bottom. Yes, I'm sorry, yes, absolutely. They form in situ, in their place, around little, in the case of nodules, they form around little nuclei like shark's teeth, for example, and the crust form on sea mounts. But the principle is the same, they need a hard surface to form on. I became really, really interested in those. And with regard to the nodules, the most interesting resource of nodules, which is for their metal content. Ferris manganese. In fact, manganese is probably the least interesting of the metals. The ferris, then. The iron is even less interesting. The most interesting content for the nodules are copper, cobalt, nickel, and zinc, and some molybdenum. And right now, cobalt is the one that is of particular interest, because of its huge use in all of our electronic devices that everyone has to have. And it is also a strategic metal, and it is also very difficult to find on land in a context where you can have security of supply that is also environmentally and socially licensed. What's the most strategic metal? What is this? A strategic metal, anything used in any kind of defense purpose. Yes, yes, yes. But your question was, how did the law of the sea link with these? Well, these nodules are in areas beyond national jurisdiction. The most important resource is, in fact, not very far away from here at all. You have Hawaii here and Mexico there. We have two fracture zones called the Clarion Clipperton Fracture Zone, and the most interesting resource is right there, but it is in international waters, which means that no single country can go and recover them without first seeking permission from an authority that is international as well that has been set up to govern the exploration and the exploitation of these resources. What's the name of that authority? It is called the International Seabed Authority, and it is headquartered in Kingston, Jamaica. It has 167 countries, plus the European Union that are party to the law of the sea convention and being party to the convention makes them also members of the authority. Anything you do out there in international waters with regard to nodules means the approval of 167 countries plus the EU. Now this is... The US is not a party to the law of the sea convention. This is a sad thing. The US has, however, signed one part of one of the amending treaties to the law of the sea convention, but it has not ratified that signature. So you know the old problem with international law, and I don't have to tell you, is the problem of how it would enforce it. Oh, it is utterly unenforceable unless the countries that are subject to it wish it to be enforced against them. I enlarge they do, but it is a complicated way to implement your law. So it's a theoretical thing more than... Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It is not at all. Our background over there, is that Ferro-Manganese nodules? Those are Ferro-Manganese nodules. And they are, in fact, I believe quite a representative field of what you can find in the Clarion-Clipperton zone, and that is actually quite a rich coverage of nodules. And those, the blue objects there, the rock-looking objects, those are the nodules? Those are the nodules, and you must note, because this is very important when you look at the environmental consequences of removing them, those nodules are resting on sediments. And what you have there is a hard sub, bottom, a hard substrate, which is the nodule, on a soft substrate, which is the sediments. And one of the two issues that are environmentally of concern, and which have really, really interesting technical possibilities, is to remove those nodules in such a way that you do not leave pure sediments behind because, in the deep sea, there are two types of organisms in this particular context. There are the ones that like to live on sediments, and the ones that like to live on nodules, and the two do not mix. So if you remove all the nodules, all the organisms that like to live on nodules have no place to go back to. So one of the interesting technical challenges in deep sea mining is to design a mining system that either leaves either nodules behind or types of nodules that, well, no, actually, that it does anyway, that's the problem. That's one other problem to work with, but I'll give you that one in a minute. Either leaves nodules behind or substitutes for the nodules, or mines in such a way that you leave little strips with nodules on the sea floor. And all of this, it's a technical question and it's also a mining approach question. Because you could, for example, design a miner that will suction up the nodules at one end. Meaning a machine. Exactly, yeah, a mining, yes, thank you. And then leaves others behind as you collect them from one end and send them up to the top of the ship. You just have other little nodules that are brought out the back, for example. Or there are several different ways you can go about it. Now, the other major environmental problem, remember the sediments? Well, you're gonna generate a big cloud of sediment as you're going over the sea floor. This is also not a good idea because you want to minimize that sediment if you possibly can, because there are out there filter feeders who need quite clear water in order to be able to filter their food out of the water. Now, if you clog up those filters, you know that from your dryer, you've got issues where you've got the same thing in the deep sea. So another really, really interesting technical challenge is to design your mining vehicle so that it generates the least amount of sediment. And another area that is really important and that we need to have a lot more information on is to find that you will generate some form of sediment, but how far does that cloud go? And how thick is it going to be? And how quickly will it attenuate with distance? And all of this requires a lot of in-sea-to experimentation, like also deciding what would be the best way to mine to leave some form of hard substrate behind. You also need in-sea-to experimentation to do some form of mimicking, at least, of what the mining might look like in the real world so you can start looking where the sediment plumes go. It isn't happening now. It is not happening now. What is happening now is exploration. And exploration involves, at this point, three big elements, all of which are controlled and mandated by the International Seabed Authority in these areas, because this is all still in international waters. Resource assessment, in other words, how many kilos per square meter are there and how variable is this resource? Because one thing that's really interesting about manganese nodules is you can have a really rich deposit, which you see here. You go a couple of hundred meters to the north or to the south or to the west, and it could be much less, could also be much more, and it could also be not there at all. And what keeps me going as a research scientist is that we still don't fully understand how nodules form. It is still one of the great mysteries of the deep sea. When you do understand it, that would be easier to find, right? In terms of resource assessment, it will be very much easier to find, yes. And it'll be also very much easier to decide how much, right now we think it's not a renewable resource at all because what we do know about nodules we think is that they form very, very slowly. So it's not like you can hoover them up and in 50 years you can come back and there will be nodules again. Probably not. It will take longer. So it would be really, really helpful because not only is the quantity variable, but remember those metals I talked about that made them so interesting? Yes, well, the content of the metals in those nodules is also very variable. So that is another element of the research to do with nodules that we do not. Because if you're gonna mine them, you need to know what you have. You can separate them for useful purposes. Yes. I mean, if in one area, the cobalt content all of a sudden plummets to almost nothing, then you don't want to go there. Even though there might be a lot of nodules there, it's not that interesting if the cobalt isn't enough, for example. These nodules are not everywhere. They're in certain places in the world, right? Well, actually, the nodule forming mechanism is, in that sense, quite ubiquitous. But the ones that form with this particular type of metal composition, though they're not very, very found ubiquitously. You've got this major resource here in the Clarence-Clipperton zone. You've got another huge resource in the Central Indian Ocean Basin. You've got a few in the Atlantic Ocean. You've got quite a few, but smaller resources in the South Pacific. But no, the ones that are really attractive, the Goldilocks nodules, if you want to call them like that. Yes, yes, yes. There's not that many places in the world. Now, you mentioned, where I see this, that southeast of the Hawaiian Islands, not very far. Well, not very far, I think. I'm trying to think now, 1,600, 2,000 nautical miles, depending on where you are in the Clarence-Clipperton zone. More than a canoe ride. Definitely. There are deposits of these nodules out there. And we have a special benefit in the sense that it's not that far from where we are. Well, actually, Hawaii is hugely lucky, and so is the United States, because the entire Hawaiian Island archipelago has, and also the other areas that are associated in various ways to the United States, like Johnson-Atoll, et cetera. There are nodules, and more importantly, in this context, ferromanganese cross-nodules. Within the US, EEZ, the US doesn't really need to go to the Clarence-Clipperton zone if it wanted to have those resources available. It's got it within its own jurisdictional waters. And in fact, we were the first here in the US and the state of Hawaii long ago to do the first environmental impact study. It was state-of-the-art, and it's still extremely good for the mining of manganese crusts, and also to the certain, and processing, by the way, processing, this was also gonna be done in the islands. This was back in the 70s, and I think it was what was then called the Minerals Management Service for the state of Hawaii. It's changed names since then. Yeah, we've got what we need here. So it's not, this is not shallow. This is deep sea. These nodules are at 4,500 to 5,000 meters. Meters, so that's 12,000 feet. That's 12,000 to 15,000 feet. And you get a, yeah. That's a lot, that's two miles. It's deep. And so how do you get down there? I know you've been on dozens and dozens of ocean voyages. Well, actually only probably two dozen. It's been 25 so far. Okay, dozen times two. I don't want to exaggerate. We're scientists here, right? No, no, no, no. I mean accurately. I'm coming up to number 25 in two weeks. Okay, well, now you're on the surface on these voyages. You can't go down two miles to look at the nodules. Oh, yes, you can. Oh, can you? Oh, how do you do that? Oh, I wanna know how you do that. Yes, you can. Unfortunately, we no longer at this university have the submarine capacity to do this we used to. And the US generally doesn't have a great deal of submarine research capacity anymore. We do still have our wonderful Alvin, which I believe has just been reconfigured to go down to 4,500 meters. But other countries, unfortunately, are doing much better than we are at this. But I was lucky when we still had the two Pisces subs here to do my... Oh, the two Pisces, I've seen them. They were at Sand Island and Snug Harbor in Sand Island, the university. Yeah, they're now, well, the last time I saw them, they were out of Makapu at the point there, just where Makai has its pier. Yeah, yeah, Makai pier. Yeah, it's always really lucky. I got to do all of my master's work with the two Pisces on Crosseema, which has a huge ferromanganese crust resource, in fact, and it's just south of the big island. But the Pisces were never able to go any deeper than 2,000 meters, which is already pretty deep. But not deep enough to look at these men? No, no, no, no. So what we have now are, and the countries that are interested in mining the nodules, and by the way, the countries out there have to get special permission from the International Seabed Authority to go out there. And they're given usually, usually it ends up being a 75,000 square kilometer license area, yeah. It's bigger, but then it gets legally weird, and you guys don't want to hear about that. But it ends up with about 75,000 square kilometers that they can then go, and then according to all the criteria that are set by the authority under the auspices of the Law of the Sea Convention, they can do the resource assessment. They have to do a huge amount of research, simply to establish environmental baseline so that when they start mining. As a condition of the license. Oh, it's not only is it a mega condition, it is very, very, very closely observed. Yeah, observed, okay. Every year there has to be a complete report sent to the ISA, and I've seen some of these, they're like this. It is cost an enormous amount of money, but for all of this, a resource assessment, and then towards the end of the exploration, it's possible to start doing a bit of tech development. So, research assessment, environmental baseline, and tech development. That means equipment. That means equipment, but that also means videos. That means everything that goes on down there is imaged. Totally imaged. I want to take a minute to sort of soak this in. And I suppose what I'm really interested in is the hypothetical, which I will ask you when we come back from this break. And the hypothetical is suppose I'm China, and I really feel a need for cobalt, and I decide that I don't care about the CBET authority. I'm going to take my ships down there. I'm going to mine some right now, because I have the technology, and I have the political will to do this, and if they want to chase me, they can chase me, but I'm doing it. Right after this break, I'd like to hear what you would say if that ever happened. It may. We'll be right back. Hi, Mabuhay. My name is Amy Ortega Anderson, inviting you to join us every Tuesday here on Pinoy Power Hawaii. With Think Tech Hawaii, we come to your home at 12 noon every Tuesday. We invite you to listen, watch, for our mission of empowerment. We aim to enrich and lighten, educate, entertain, and we hope to empower. Again, maraming, salamat po, Mabuhay, and aloha. Aloha, my name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea is on Think Tech Hawaii every other Monday at 11 a.m. Please join me where my guests talk about law topics and ideas and music and Hawaii Anna all across the sea from Hawaii and back again, aloha. We're talking about research of Manoa, some of the most interesting kind. Filamine Verlan, Dr. Filamine Verlan of UH Manoa, SOAS, and also of the UK. And she is a global researcher of ferromagnese nodules, which are going to be very important to the world. Okay, so my question, my hypothetical before we left, and I'm just wondering what your reaction is, what would happen? What would the Sea Bed Authority do if China decided it wanted, sort of the way it's handled the South China Sea, right? It decided it wanted cobalt nodules and the hell would anybody try to stop them? Well, I don't know what the Sea Bed Authority would do, but we have in the Law of the Sea Convention an extensive set of chapters that talk about dispute resolution. And it has also set up a specialized tribunal called the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. It also has within that context a specialized Sea Bed Disputes Tribunal. And that is where the situation would be brought, whether it be brought by the authority or by other countries that might find that this is problematic from their own point of view is an open point, an open question, but that is where it would be taken in the first instance to have the International Court that has been set up specifically to deal with these subjects to deal with. Is this connected with the International Court of Justice in the hand? I know it's a completely independent body. It's a different group of judges. The judges are based in Hamburg and they're elected for, I believe, anyway, some sort of term and they're elected by the members of the parties. I suppose they've found that China had willfully violated the rules of the Sea Bed Authority. What would they be able to do? A court of such can do nothing. It can simply state whether or not this is or is not consistent with the obligations under the Law of the Sea Convention. And how that is that these judgments are then enforced, again, because it is an international judgment by the countries in various ways. There are... Sanctions by... There are various responses. That might be, for example, one potential response. What generally tends to happen is a lot of in-the-corridor type discussion afterwards. First. So I wanted to, we have a few minutes left and I wanted to explore with you an advised term where this is going. Because it sounds to me, I'm just integrating from what you've said and what I read about your talk last week. This is of enormous value in American dollars. The amount of Sea Bed is much greater than the amount of land in this world. And the amount of these valuable materials is huge. And the value is huge. And we can find an economic, feasible way to mine them. Of course, without disturbing the environment. That is a source of a number of materials that we do not otherwise have, but which, going forward, we will probably need in our technology and manufacturing. So it seems to me with, what did you say, 180 or 90 countries involved. 167 plus the EU. Okay, 167. Which is 27 or 26, depending on where Britain is at this point in this context. Among those countries, probably among those countries, are the countries that are most interested in the proceeds of this mining. They would like to use these materials. They'd like to be involved in it. They would like to invest in it and so forth and develop the technology. So it strikes me that the stakes are huge. Maybe that's why so many people came down to see what you had to say last week. Maybe among them were some people who had stakes. So I'm thinking that ultimately there's going to be some tension and contention about who mines what and where and the seabed authority is going to be under a fair amount of pressure and its court will be under a fair amount of pressure and the amount of money, the amount of global effect, economic effect is going to be huge because we don't have these on land. And so how do you see this unfolding? How do you see it going forward? Give me, if you would, I know it's speculation and scientists never like speculation. Neither do lawyers. That's a double. Lawyers, scientists likes speculation even less. You've got a double no speculation person sitting here but finish your question and we'll see what we can do with it. Give me five or 10 years on this. Give me the development of technologies because there will be private companies, multinational companies that will put the money in, probably already ready to put the money in to do the exploration, to do the testing, to develop the technology to mine visibly. And so how is this going to unfold in the next five or 10 years? Are we going to see an Oklahoma land rush here? Oklahoma seabed rush, if you will. How are we going to see this unfolding? How will it affect us? How will it affect our economy? How will it affect our ability to manufacture? You have to distinguish between any mining that's going to go on in international waters and any mining that's going to go on within national jurisdiction, all right? I am not going to talk about the mining within national jurisdiction because that is the total responsibility of the state in whose jurisdiction it is. They don't need to answer to anyone. Even the seabed authority? Now there is a very interesting question there. Because of the way the law, the sea convention works and the way part 11, which sets out the rules for deep sea mining works, the environmental rules for deep sea mining within national jurisdiction can be no weaker than what the seabed authority has set up for mining in international jurisdiction. This is not generally known. I hope you put this in your notes because it's going to be on the final exam. I recommend to everyone's attention reading that law of the sea convention and if you want to focus your attention on deep sea mining, it's part 11. By the way, the seabed authority does not have its own court. This is the international tribunal for the law of the sea that has a seabed dispute chamber. The law of the sea tribunal addresses all oceans issues that arise under the convention. Okay, just want to make sure that everyone understands that. That's a good consolidation, I think. Well, it's very, very good because one of the points of the convention was to have peaceful resolution of disputes and it made an entire menu of peaceful resolution options available. And you have to integrate all these issues together. You can't look at silence. Yes, yes, yes. Yes, because all these boundaries that we like to put in the sea, the sea doesn't recognize them, completely irrelevant to them, right? To anything that lives in the oceans, which is another aspect of the convention, it's the only international instrument that actually does take a global view of the environment. However, your question was a little bit down the road. Well, in international waters, in fact, it's not gonna be such a huge gold mine as you might think because what was trying to be avoided was to have exactly that kind of gold rush, where again, only the highly technically sophisticated countries could go sit on a resource and take all the benefits. The benefits from that mining needs to be shared with the rest of the world. And there is a whole section again of this convention in part 11 that sets out how that is to be done. So first you have to pay, sort out the cost of the International Seabed Authority, which is supposed to be funded by this mining. Then you have to, and that's what they're working on now, by the way, decide how the benefits are going to be distributed, which involves negotiating a royalty regime with the countries that are out there mining. Whether they do it through a company or not is a different matter. But there are royalties of which a part has to go to the Seabed Authority, who then has to distribute it to the rest of the world. So all of a sudden, you can't just look at it as a company would its normal bottom line. You go in there, you calculate the tech, you calculate the resource, you calculate how much it would be. All of these elements make the economic situation and the commercial situation and the decision to go out there in mine far more complicated in international waters. But we really need to do that. Well, we don't necessarily need to go into international waters. A lot of these resources, like I said, are available inside in national waters as well, but not everybody has them. Yeah, yeah. Did that give you a little bit of a feel? Yes, it does. And in our IC happening, a need to strengthen the Seabed Authority, a need to strengthen the court on the law of the sea convention so that it can actually have some teeth on this sort of thing, that it can receive the funds, that the Seabed Authority can receive the funds, distribute the funds, and all the members will play ball in accordance with the commonly agreed rules. You know, it may be that there will, people who will break and run, who will jump ship. Well, that has happened in international laws since international law was first actually started by the Phoenicians. And there are many, many different ways that nation states have evolved to try to deal with that. Yeah. Okay, well, I want to see it happening in an orderly fashion. But we all want to see it happen in an orderly fashion. I want to add one other thing. You mentioned before that there were disturbances on the ocean bottom. If you don't properly remove the Ferro-Manganese modules for it, nodules for example. I just wanted to hear recently, I think it was in Brazil where the Chinese have gotten into infrastructure that mines iron ore. And Brazil is a huge source of iron ore. However, there have been, call it the effect of climate change. There have been floods, okay, in the areas where these mines have been built. And large communities have been inundated. There have been huge damage to the environment. Well, there's been a tragic incident just the other day, I think. Yeah, yeah. And so I suggest to you, Philamine, that was to go forward. Mining of the same materials on land is going to become more difficult because of climate change and who knows what else. And so it puts even greater focus on the prospect of mining at sea, don't you think? What is really encouraging about the prospect of mining at sea is because it's so new. It's a very, very emerging industry. There has not been any mining yet. Everyone is concerned to get it right because they can still do it. The technology has not yet been cast in stone. They do not want to have these environmental issues. They're really trying to get it right. And the Seabed Authority is trying to orchestrate the getting it right because they have to approve all the proposals that are coming to them for the technology and for the environmental solutions that are being involved. It's the first truly international conversation that we're having about a globally shared resource in a way that's actually trying to come up with enforceable solutions unlike what's going on with the climate change discussions. Thank you for that. So there's camera one. I warned you before that I might ask you to address our audience on this, but we hadn't decided exactly what subject I would ask you to address our audience. My subject is, if I'm a student, a student of ocean and earth science, for example, or a student of law, is this a good area for me to get into? Will this be, you know, rewarding academically, rewarding financially? And what should I do to get into a position near you on this subject? You mean me personally? You professionally. I think rewarding financially is probably not the first criterion you want to use in choosing a career. You can always make money, but what you want is something that also feeds the soul a bit, yes? So if you want something that is truly exciting because it's so interdisciplinary, go into any type of field that involves oceanography, all right? That's the first thing I want to say. I'm with the Department of Oceanography at SOAST. You have to use every possible discipline to be able to be a proper oceanographer. So if you're a student, start looking at that, and then you can start refining down where you might want to go. Right now, deep sea mining is flavor of the month, but I've been through two false dawns with deep sea mining, and there is absolutely no reason why there couldn't be a third. It's another good reason to stay in oceanography because it gives you other opportunities. The previous 25 years, I've not been involved in deep sea mining because there's not been any funding, but the law degree and the oceanography degree have made it possible to stay involved in marine matters. With regard to getting close to me professionally, oh, dear, I'm very busy. This cannot be an invitation to please try to get in touch with me because I do not like to leave frustrated people in my wake, and you will be very frustrated. But they can still learn these things, they can still get involved, they can still be part of this enormous process that I see unfolding. So as for you, Philomene Verlan, what I have to say to you professionally is the best is yet to come. This is always true if you're dealing with research. Totally, totally. Do I have one more minute? Sure. Really, what I want to say is if we never mine a nodule, ever we have learned so much about the deep sea in the last five years, since this became interesting again in the current dawn, that it's been worthwhile just for that, just for that. And if we never do anything else but that, that knowledge is good for all our generations. And could we please not stop funding deep sea research if money for mining dries up? Please. Yeah. Thank you, Philomene. Thank you so much for the opportunity. Thank you so much for coming back. Oh, such a pleasure, such a pleasure. Thank you.