The Canadian government says it will back an international moratorium against efforts to open up the deep sea to mining after a Vancouver-based company sparked a process to regulate the industry.
Two years ago, The Metals Company partnered with the Pacific island nation of Nauru to submit an application to mine an abyssal plain several kilometres below the ocean's surface between Hawaii and Mexico. That triggered a two-year countdown in which the International Seabed Authority — the little-known United Nations body — was required to write the rules of the road for deep sea mining.
The nodules form layer by layer over millions of years as dissolved metals precipitate out of seawater around a sunken shark tooth, fossil or shard of rock. The Vancouver-based company says the metals — which include nickel, copper, cobalt and manganese — represent "a battery in a rock" that could provide a stable supply of metals to feed an electric vehicle fleet equivalent to all the cars currently on the road in the United States.
But earlier this year, three advocacy groups claimed that The Metals Company appeared to be caught violating its protocols after two videos were leaked purporting to show waste sediment getting dumped into the Pacific Ocean during the expedition. But the videos, allegedly captured and leaked by scientists paid by The Metals Company, appear to show the Hidden Gem discharging sediment directly into the ocean's surface.