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Norway may soon open waters in the Arctic and sub-Arctic to sea floor mining – growing demand for important minerals, including copper and nickel
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- Title
- Norway Aims to Open Arctic Waters to Deep-Sea Mining
There was a good episode of the BBC Radio 4 programme Inside Science on the possibilities and pitfalls of deep sea mining last week. It's definitely a muddy question of whether it's something we should be doing at all, especially with the crazy biodiversity we're becoming aware of on the ocean floor and the potential to irreversibly destroy those habitats. I think the argument made in this article that Norway should do it because it has a track record of being environmentally responsible is a bit disingenuous. Norway taking precautions isn't going to lead to other countries doing the same, it's just going to normalise the process as a whole.
The article even mentioned that some of these unique conditions took thousands of years to get like this,
And also that there's plenty of minerals to recycle without having to destroy more parts of the not well explored planet.
Their comment about these unique conditions actually refers to this line from the article:
So they're discussing the thousands of years that would in be required to return the environment to its pre-exploited state if this deep sea mining were to take place.
You're right, here's a source, albeit an industry source, to back that up. https://www.mining.com/web/visualizing-the-opportunity-cost-of-unrecycled-metals-in-the-us/