Bizarre fish appear in the diving robot's beam of light, including creepy creatures, some with transparent heads or glowing abdomens. Crabs, sea cucumbers, anemones and brittle stars are also illuminated. At a depth of thousands of meters, creatures swim in front of the cameras that fascinate Sabine Gollner again and again, some of whom have never been seen before. The Austrian is a marine biologist at the Royal Marine Research Institute of the Netherlands in Texel. Once a year, she travels to the area between Mexico and Hawaii – and explores the deep sea. Sabine Gollner is particularly fond of colourful sponges at the bottom. "Beauty of the deep sea" is what she calls the sessile animals that have grown attached to dark clumps.
Andreas Frey
Freelance writer in academia for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
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The world down there seems lonely, silent and peaceful, like an endless desert of mud and stones. In fact, however, it is teeming with life, says Sabine Gollner. This could soon be over – and Gollner's favorite animals are now also threatened. This is because the sponges grow on manganese nodules, lumpy metal compounds that lie at depths of 3000 to 6000 meters. Whenever the prices of rare metals rise on the world market, there is a growing interest in recovering the nodules from the deep sea. Two years ago, the island nation of Nauru, together with a Canadian mining company, was the first nation to inform the seabed authority that it wanted to start deep-sea mining. Mining regulations now have to be developed there, an undertaking with many unknowns. And time is of the essence. A proposal must be drawn up by July.
The coveted black nodules, around which everything revolves, are made of various metals, mainly manganese and iron, and in smaller quantities also copper, cobalt, nickel and zinc. Traces of molybdenum, lithium and titanium can be detected, as well as some rare earths, at least some of the most sought-after raw materials. These manganese nodules take millions of years to bind so many metals dissolved in water around a solid core that they reach the size of a potato. In the Pacific, between Mexico and Hawaii, lies the commercially interesting deposit in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone.
Mining companies and commodity traders are currently dreaming of the treasure of the deep sea, whereby companies do not mean the high biodiversity or the unique ecosystem, but the valuable raw materials that must finally be exploited. To do this, all you have to do is harvest the manganese nodules from the seabed like potatoes, they say. After all, they lie close together in endless fields. Technically, this is complex, but possible.
In fact, the race for the deep sea seems to be gaining momentum. There is talk of a new gold rush, of the solution to all green commodity problems. After all, the treasure of the deep sea serves a good cause, they say. It is needed to transform the world into a climate-neutral future. After all, large quantities of precious metals and minerals are needed to build all the new electric cars, wind turbines, solar cells and batteries. The companies are not primarily targeting manganese, but copper, cobalt, nickel and rare earths. Their demand will rise sharply, the International Energy Agency calculates. And mining on the seabed has advantages: In contrast to mining on land, deep-sea mining does not devour forests, pollutes soils and does not lead to social conflicts. In addition, the raw materials lie in large quantities on the seabed and could reduce dependencies on monopolists such as China, Congo and Russia. If the companies have their way, commercial mining should therefore begin as soon as possible.