 Welcome to Think Tech on Spectrum OC16, Hawaii's weekly newscast on things that matter to tech and Hawaii. I'm Jay Fidel. And I'm Elise Anderson. In our show this time we'll attend a talk on deep sea mining by visiting professor Philomene Verlon at the Science Cafe. She's an oceanographer specializing in the biogeochemistry and ecology of deep sea mining and also a lawyer specializing in the law of the sea. The Science Cafe, part of the Hawaii Academy of Science, celebrated its 10-year anniversary with a talk by Philomene Verlon, a visiting colleague at the Department of Oceanography in the School of Ocean and Earth Science, SOEST, at UH Manoa. Dr. Verlon is an oceanographer specializing in the biogeochemistry and ecology of deep sea mining of ferromagnese nodules and crusts. She took her PhD at Imperial College in London. In her work she has done some 24 ocean research voyages. 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, yes, you can. Unfortunately, we no longer at this university have the submarine capacity to do this. We used to. And the U.S. 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. And but I was lucky when we still had the two Pisces subs here to do my two Pisces. I've seen them. Yeah. They were at Sand Island and Snug Harbor and Sand Island University. Yeah, they're now there. Well, the last time I saw them, they were out of Makapu at the point there, just where Makai has its pier. Yeah, Makai pier. Yeah. The, it's always really lucky. I got to do all of my master's work with the two Pisces on cross seam out, which has a huge ferro manganese cross resource, in fact, and it's just south of the big island. And but the Pisces were never able to go any deeper than 2000 meters, which is already pretty deep. But not deep enough to look at these men. No. Okay. No, no, no. She's also a lawyer specializing in the law of the sea. She assists international public and private entities in the interface between marine science and the law of the sea to achieve responsible deep sea mining. 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. Deep sea mining is an emerging marine industry with huge prospects, competition and contention. The technological, scientific, environmental, social, industrial, political, economic and legal challenges that must be addressed to make it profitable, however, are very challenging. These nodules are in areas beyond national jurisdiction. The most important resources, 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. So anything you do out there in international waters with regard to nodules means the approval of 167 countries plus the EU. 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. The countries out there have to get special permission from the International Seabed Authority to go out there and they're given, usually it ends up being a 75,000 square kilometer 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. Every year there has to be a complete report sent to the ISA. I've seen some of these, they're like this. This costs 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. What would happen? What would the seabed authority do? If China decided it wanted sort of the way it's handled the South China Seas, right? It decided it wanted cobalt nodules and to hell with anybody trying to stop them. Well I don't know what the seabed 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 seabed 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. 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. Suppose they found that China had willfully violated the rules of the seabed authority. What would they be able to do? A court as 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. Dr. Verlans talk described the deep sea metal bearing mineral deposits that are of greatest interest to the industry. Ferromanganese nodules, cobalt crusts and polymetallic sulfides found on the ocean floor 4500 meters below sea level southeast of Hawaii and their distinctive biogeophysical marine environments. She presented an overview of the industrial interest in these resources, the extraction technologies and the technical environmental and regulatory issues with emphasis on the Pacific Islands. 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 with the case of nodules. They form around little nuclei like shark's teeth, for example, and the cross-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. Ferromanganese. In fact, manganese is probably the least interesting of the metals. 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 is a strategic metal? What is this? A strategic metal, anything used in any kind of defense purpose. Yes, yes, yes. 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 Clare and 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. Our background over there, is that Ferromanganese nodules? Those are Ferromanganese nodules. And they are, in fact, I believe quite a representative field of what you can find in the Clare and 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 seafloor. And all of this is 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 going to generate a big cloud of sediment as you're going over the seafloor. 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 situ experimentation, like also deciding what would be the best way to mine to leave some form of hard substrate behind. You also need in situ 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. Hawaii is hugely lucky and so is the United States, because the entire Hawaiian island archipelago and also the other areas that are associated in various ways to the United States, like Johnson-Atoll, etc. There are nodule and more importantly in this context ferromanganese crust nodules within the U.S. EEZ, the U.S. doesn't really need to go to the Clarion 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 U.S. 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 going to 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. 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 hundred meters to the north or to the south or to the west and it could be much less. It 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. 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. In international waters, in fact, it's not going to 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. Dr. Verlan's talk was part of a film and seminar series cosponsored by the Center for Pacific Island Studies at the University of Hawaii and the Pacific Islands Development Program at East West Center. If you want to know more about the oceanography program at the School of Ocean and Earth Science at UH Manoa, check it out at sows.hawaii.edu. And now let's take a look at our ThinkTech calendar of events going forward. There's so much happening in Hawaii. Sometimes things happen under the radar and we don't hear much about them, but ThinkTech will take you there. Remember, you can watch ThinkTech on Spectrum OC16 several times every week to stay current on what's happening in government, industry, academia, and communities around the islands and the world. ThinkTech broadcasts daily talk shows live on the internet from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays. Then we broadcast our earlier shows all night long and on the weekends. 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While you're watching any of our shows, you can call in to 808-374-2014 and pose a question to participate in the discussion. And now here's this week's ThinkTech commentary. Aloha, my name is Jay Fidel. I'm the CEO of ThinkTechHawaii. ThinkTech is a Hawaii nonprofit dedicated to raising public awareness about tech, energy, diversification, global affairs, and much more through digital media. We stream 35 live talk shows a week on ThinkTechHawaii.com. We upload them to YouTube and iTunes and we broadcast our top shows on community television and Spectrum OC16 cable. ThinkTech is a study in citizen journalism. The value of citizen journalism is that all the people involved become more actively engaged in a more thoughtful examination of the world around them. By this interaction we can build a more dynamic, productive community dialogue. We can become more curious, more aware, and better informed and educated and better citizens. 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Thanks so much for being part of our ThinkTech family and for supporting our open discussion of tech, energy, diversification, and global awareness in Hawaii, and of course, the study of ancient education in Egypt. You can watch this show throughout the week and tune in next Sunday evening for our next important ThinkTech episode. I'm Jay Fiedel. And I'm Elise Anderson. Aloha, everyone.