This was by far the most important episode of the series. I am sure that many viewers were troubled by the scale of some of the issues touched upon in the programme; as biological scientists, we live in this state of concern perpetually, both professionally and personally. I tend to see a disconnect amongst the public, that the world we inhabit in our cities and towns are independent of ecological relationships that existed before humans, and now around humans, particularly when it comes to ocean life. In reality, this is not the case. Humans inhabit a unique ecological niche in the history of life on Earth, in that we are the only superpredators ever to regularly predate on the adult forms of other apex predators, in every environment on Earth. There has been talk of considering the era of humans a new geological epoch, defined by extinction, climate change and a stratigraphic layer of plastic for the geologists of the future. Accepting these problems are happening, let alone confronting them, can be depressing. I can’t speak for everyone, but taking a step back, as a scientist, and thinking of these as an interesting series of problems to be understood, is at least how I have decided apply myself to it. Entire books and feature length films have been made on each of the ecological issues in this final episode, so I will only focus on overfishing.

Unlike life on land, which has been drastically modified by humans for as long as we have existed, ocean life has only become heavily exploited more recently (although setting a baseline can be contentious). We have thought of life in the ocean as this resource which will  never be exhausted. Marine biologists have learned in the last few decades that this is not the case. A high profile example is the cod fishery off of Newfoundland, Canada, which was a plentiful food source for 500 years, thought to be the most productive fishery in the world. As fishing technologies improved, more fish could be caught more efficiently and in less time. After regulation failed to curb declines, the cod population completely collapsed in the early 1990s, and has still not recovered. With such a large amount of large predatory cod absent from the ecosystem, a trophic cascade occurred, where smaller fish severely declined and zooplankton, seals and crabs exploded in population. Meanwhile, cod in this area rarely reach adulthood here anymore. Managing the fishery like a resource by considering only population size, and not complex life histories and other ecological relationships, lead to this economic and biological catastrophe.

The wild caught fish that we eat is wildlife, and they shouldn’t be glossed over with the same brush as I sometimes see. Different commercially available fish are as ecologically different to each other as songbirds are to tigers. Tunas for example are apex predators, and although eating tigers, sharks and lions is unusual in the Western world, tuna consumption is extremely widespread. Imagine feeding tiger meat to your cat. Some bluefin tuna can grow to the size of a small car and have endangered or critically endagnered IUCN conservation status (on the same level as the Bengal tiger and black rhinoceros) and yet are still available at most sushi restaurants. There is always talk of ‘dolphin friendly’ tuna, but tuna themselves require urgent conservation as well. Despite improved scientific method, commercial fish species continue to decline worldwide, and faster than estimated.

I am sometimes asked: as a concerned citizen, what can I do in the face of these problems? Honestly, there is no easy answer. Some of the things I would recommend have been suggested a thousand times before, but I will make a few suggestions anyway:

• Only buy what you need. One third of all food is thrown out without being consumed – enough to feed two billion people in a time when one billion are malnourished – a tremendous waste of resources, and your own money. The same applies for all products – for everything you can buy to be produced, finite resources have had to be mined, extensive packaging has been used and goods have been shipped around the world.
• Use less packaging and bottles. 3 billion one-use coffee cups are thrown away in the UK every year, and less than 1% are recycled. This is one cup thrown away in the UK for every person in North and South America, Europe and Africa combined. Get a water bottle, reusable shopping bags and a refillable coffee cup. And is a straw really needed? This is one of the easiest changes to make.
• If you are going to eat seafood, be aware of where it comes from, and what kind of animal you are actually eating. As a general rule, it is better to eat lower down the food chain – sardines, jellyfish and shellfish for instance, and pole and line caught fish minimises bycatch associated with longlines and the habitat destruction associated with trawls. None of this is confidential information – a quick search and you can find plenty of information from the Marine Conservation Society (they even have iOS and Android apps) about where different species come from and how they are caught.
• Similarly, different foods require different resources. As a general rule, a diet with the least amount of environmental impact consists primarily of fruits, vegetables and grains and little or no meat. And if you can, buy produce that has not travelled a long way – less air miles, and less wastage from spoilage during long transits. See video below.
• Above all else, understand these issues – to me, this takes away their overwhelming amorphous terror. Start by learning about the human species in context. I cannnot recommend Elizabeth Kolbert’s incredible Pulitzer-winning The Sixth Extinction  enough, as a highly readable introduction to the concept. She interviews scientists watching their life’s work go extinct, visits an island made of bleached coral on the Great Barrier Reef and talks about how perceptions take a generation or so to change. Those more interested in marine life specifically should try Callum Roberts’ The Unnatural History of the Sea, who meticulously ploughs through archaic records from early fishermen, pirates and explorers to set a new baseline for human impacts on the ocean.

Despite grave threats facing the ocean, life is remarkably resilient, and where beneficial alternatives are provided, there are success stories. Despite resistance from the fishing industry, no-take zones like those in New Zealand have proved highly successful at restoring fully mature fish and species not seen in decades, protecting biodiversity and then being available for fishing as well. For us, the four-year Blue Belt plan aims to protect 4 million square kilometres of marine habitat, an area larger than India, across 7 UK Overseas Territories. Ultimately, getting business to prioritise conservation, and large scale international cooperation on legislation are ultimate goals, but these large scale changes always begin with small groups of scientist, campaigners and passionate citizens. Some of this has come from our university. If you can convince your place of work to waste less food or use less plastic, then why not do it? You can also go here to check if your local MP is on board with the Blue Belt plan, and contact them to tell them to vote in its favour. As a country with the fifth largest area of marine habitat in its jurisdiction, having this go through UK parliament would be globally significant.

The public engagement from this new Blue Planet series has been extremely heartening. It was so popular in China that it slowed down the internet there, and is the third most watched series of the last five years. I look forward to seeing what people inspired by the series will do in the future.

Feel free to ask me any further questions on Twitter @kieranyes.

The post Blue Planet 2 | Episode 7 | Our Blue Planet appeared first on Exploring our Oceans .

But the expedition also provided an opportunity to collect data about the environment – in particular, the temperature and salinity of water at different depths. Whenever we explore the oceans, I think it’s important to collect all the data we can, especially when we’re visiting remote places such as the poles and the deep ocean.

The environmental changes taking place in the Antarctic are complex – an intricate interplay between ocean, atmosphere, land ice and sea ice – with different Antarctic regions changing in different ways (e.g. Steig et al., 2009). It’s not a simple story of “more carbon dioxide traps more heat in the atmosphere that then melts the ice” (the changes in the Arctic are perhaps more straightforward in that regard, as this summary by David Shukman, BBC News Science Editor, explains).

That’s why thousands of scientists have been investigating different aspects of what’s happening in Antarctic over decades, to untangle the complex knot of processes involved.  And as well as interacting with each other, the strands of that knot (ocean, atmosphere, land ice, sea ice) are also affected by natural variability (e.g. Mulvaney et al., 2012), can sometimes be influenced by changes elsewhere on our planet such as the equatorial Pacific (e.g. Ding et al., 2011), and by changes that we have made to the atmosphere – not just adding carbon dioxide to it overall (e.g. Marshall et al., 2004; Goosse et al., 2008), but also through the depletion of the ozone layer above Antarctica affecting winds around the continent (e.g. Thompson & Solomon, 2002).

The complexity of what’s happening in the Antarctic is all the more reason to take every opportunity to collect more data points, like these during our expedition:

On their own, our measurements of ocean temperature and salinity at different depths during the Blue Planet II expedition don’t tell us much – of course you can’t really understand processes or measure changes from one set of measurements in one place at one time. But the expedition’s data are archived so that scientists can compare them with other measurements, taken at other times and in other locations and combined into large datasets by international research programmes, to help towards building a more detailed picture of what’s going on.

For Blue Planet II, we were working at the northern tip of the “Antarctic Peninsula”, the narrow finger of land that points up towards South America. What’s clear from previous studies is that this particular part of Antarctica has seen some rapid recent changes, such as:

• an overall increase of around 1.8 degrees C in annual average air temperatures since the late 1940s, recorded at Argentina’s Esperanza Base (data available here), which was the closest weather station to where we were working:

• …and that’s consistent with the general pattern of warmer annual average air temperatures recorded by other weather stations towards the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula over that period (Vaughan et al., 2003).  In the last few years some parts of the Peninsula have seen cooler summers again (Turner et al., 2016), possibly as a result of the regeneration of the ozone layer above Antarctica affecting the winds around it, but that doesn’t reverse the large surface air temperature increase in this region of Antarctica since the mid-twentieth century;
• Esperanza Base also holds the record for the warmest surface air temperature ever recorded in mainland Antarctica and its surrounding islands: 17.5 degrees C on 24 March 2015. That one-off warm day was probably caused by a “Foehn Wind” (which we’ll explore later);
• an increase of more than 1 degree C in summer sea surface temperatures around the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula since the 1960s (Meredith & King, 2005);
• the retreat of 88% of the glaciers on the Antarctic Peninsula since the 1940s (Cook et al., 2005; Cook et al., 2016), and the total collapse of floating ice shelves such as Larsen A in 1995 and Larsen B in 2002 (Cook & Vaughan, 2010).

Some of the changes on the Antarctic Peninsula may lie within the range of natural variations recorded in ice cores over the past 2000 years, but the recent warming is unusually rapid (Mulvaney et al., 2012). And the last time that any changes like these occurred, floating ice shelves such as Larsen B did not collapse (Domack et al., 2005), and there weren’t 7.6 billion of us who could be affected by what is going on. That’s what takes us into uncharted territory today.

Glaciers, floating ice shelves, and sea level rise

Sea level rise is one change that can affect us all, and it involves changes in the rate at which ice forms on land and flows into the ocean. Snow that falls on Antarctica eventually compresses under its own weight to form ice, building up ice sheets on the land. As more ice builds up, it flows out in glaciers and ice streams towards the coast, where it then floats out over the sea, forming the floating “tongues” of glaciers and more massive floating ice shelves. Eventually, the ice breaks off those floating tongues and shelves to form icebergs of fresh water, sometimes hundreds of metres thick.

The “calving” of icebergs from the ends of glaciers is a natural process, as the amount of snow falling on land gradually builds up more ice over time. During the Blue Planet II expedition, I was particularly interested in how that process delivers “dropstones” to the ocean floor – rocks scoured from the land by the glaciers and carried out to sea on the underside of icebergs, from which they fall to provide “islands” of rocky habitat for different types of animals on the seafloor.  Glaciologists can monitor numbers of icebergs and the flow of glaciers using satellites, but I also had an opportunity to make some closer observations of bergs from the air, to try to understand more about how they deliver dropstones that we saw on the ocean floor during dives.

But when it comes to sea level rise, what’s important is the rate at which ice flows from the land into the sea via this process. The floating ice shelves and floating ends of glaciers act as buttresses for the ice, slowing its slide into the ocean.  The buoyant force exerted by the ocean on the end of the floating “tongue” of a glacier, or across the front of a floating ice shelf, pushes back against the downhill flow of ice from the land.  If the floating glacier tongue or ice shelf becomes thinner, or retreats so that the “grounding line” where it starts to float out from the land is further inshore, then it offers less resistance to the flow of ice from land into the ocean (there’s a really good diagram explaining the forces involved here).

So if the floating “tongues” of glaciers or more massive floating ice shelves become thinner or disintegrate, then ice flows more rapidly from land into the sea. Because ice on land is not yet afloat, when it reaches the sea it pushes up the water level, like dropping ice cubes into a drink. In contrast, “sea ice” – the skin of ice only a few metres thick created when the surface of the ocean freezes – does not have the same effect on sea level, because it’s formed from water that is already in the ocean.  What matters then, for Antarctica’s role in sea level rise, is how the floating tongues of glaciers, floating ice shelves, and flow of ice from land to sea are changing.

Antarctica in three parts

Antarctica is huge: its land area (~14 million km²) is about 50 percent larger than the United States. To understand what’s going on for sea level rise, we need to divide Antarctic into three parts, because what’s happening is different in these regions:

• the Antarctic Peninsula, which is the narrow finger of land that points up towards South America (and we were working at the tip of the Peninsula for the Blue Planet II expedition);
• the area covered by West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and in particular the coastline on the Amundsen Sea where several glaciers drain that ice sheet into the ocean;
• the area covered by the much more massive East Antarctic Ice Sheet, which covers most of the interior of the continent and the South Pole.

Fortunately, there isn’t that much ice on land on the Antarctic Peninsula, where air and sea temperatures are changing the most, to drive much sea level rise from there. Further south, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has the potential to drive much more, and some of its floating ice shelves are thinning and retreating, because of an upwelling of warm deep water. Meanwhile the enormous East Antarctic Ice Sheet fortunately appears stable, though one particular glacier outlet could be changing in ways similar to some of the glaciers draining the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

Changes to glaciers draining into the sea on the Antarctic Peninsula

596 out of 674 (i.e. 88% of) sea-ending glaciers on the Antarctic Peninsula have retreated since records began in the 1940s (Cook et al., 2016), and 7 out of 12 of its floating ice shelves have retreated significantly or collapsed completely (Cook & Vaughan, 2010). The retreat of glaciers and floating ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula is driven by two different processes, one operating on each side of the Peninsula. On the western side, the floating ends of glaciers are mainly being eroded from underneath by an upwelling of warmer deep ocean water, rather than changes in air temperature. But on the eastern side of the Peninsula, more frequent warm winds create melt ponds that eat through floating ice shelves from above.

Most of the retreating glaciers of the Antarctic Peninsula are on its western side, along the coast of the Bellingshausen Sea, where there has been upwelling of warmer “Circumpolar Deep Water” to depths of 100-300 m (Cook et al., 2016). That upwelling of warmer deep water to melt those glacier tongues is a different process to the warming of sea surface temperatures further north on the Peninsula – and not a result of the warming air temperatures on the Peninsula either – but instead driven by changes in wind patterns around Antarctica that in turn drive some changes in ocean circulation (e.g. Peck et al., 2015).

Meanwhile, and in contrast, on the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula, the demise of the Larsen A floating ice shelf in 1995, and the Larsen B floating ice shelf in 2002, was probably hastened by warm Foehn winds, which cause melt ponds to form on the surface of floating ice shelves, eventually eating through them and breaking them up.

Foehn winds are warm winds created when a wind drops down the side of a mountain, compressing the air and thereby warming it. On the Antarctic Peninsula, circumpolar winds get pushed up against the western side of the mountains of the peninsula, and when they spill over the top or through gaps to the eastern side, they drop down and create the Foehn warming effect there, contributing to the break-up of floating ice shelves (Cape et al., 2015). There’s a useful BBC News feature about the phenomenon – and its effect on ice shelves on the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula – here.

(As an aside, the factors behind the huge iceberg that recently broke off the Larsen C ice shelf, and whether the remainder of that floating ice shelf will similarly collapse soon, are even more complex, as discussed here).

Immediately after Larsen B ice shelf collapsed in 2002, scientists measured an acceleration in the slide of ice from the land there into the sea, contributing to sea level rise (Rignot et al., 2004). Fortunately, the Antarctic Peninsula is only a narrow strip of land and there’s not so much ice on land there: if all the ice on the Antarctic Peninsula slid into the sea, it would raise global sea level by about 24 centimetres (Pritchard & Vaughan, 2007), and what really matters is how quickly that process happens.  To put that in context, the current rate of global sea level rise is about 3 millimetres per year, and ice loss from the Antarctic Peninsula is currently contributing around 0.16 mm per year to global sea level rise (Pritchard & Vaughan, 2007).

Changes to glaciers draining ice into the sea from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet

Further south, the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet contains much more ice locked up on land than on the Antarctic Peninsula, and changes in the much larger glaciers draining it into the Amundsen Sea (e.g. Pine Island Glacier and Thwaites Glacier) are the main concern here. If those glaciers fail as buttresses, the impact on sea level rise could be much greater than from the Antarctic Peninsula.

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is also a “marine ice sheet”, which means that its base, although inland, actually lies below sea level.  This may make it particularly susceptible to a “runaway” effect if the ice shelves buttressing its flow into the ocean weaken, potentially allowing the ice that is currently inland to become afloat and thereby drive up sea levels substantially (Joughin & Alley, 2011).

The floating end of Pine Island Glacier already appears to be thinning and retreating (e.g. Wingham et al., 2009), as a result of warm deep water upwelling to melt its underside (Jenkins et al., 2010). As a result of such changes, the amount of ice sliding from land into sea from the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet has increased, and already contributes around 10% of the observed rise in global sea level (Rignot et al., 2008). If all the ice in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet ended up in the ocean (perhaps unlikely, though it has declined substantially in the more distant past, e.g. Pollard & DeConto, 2009), there’s enough ice there in total to raise global sea level by around 3.3 metres (Bamber et al., 2009).

Changes to the East Antarctic Ice Sheet

On the other side of the Antarctic continent, the even larger East Antarctic Ice Sheet contains yet more ice on land – more than ten times the amount locked up in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. The good news here is that it appears to be stable – in fact, increased snowfall over central Antarctica means that the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is actually gaining mass at the moment (King et al., 2012). And where it drains into the sea via glaciers, there aren’t upwelling warmer waters flowing close inshore to erode the floating ends of the glaciers and the floating ice shelves that buttress the ice flow.

There is one exception, however: at the Totten Ice Tongue, there are seafloor channels bringing warm deep waters to the underside of the floating end of the glacier, causing it to get thinner (Rintoul et al., 2017). That may be unique for a glacier draining the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, but the “catchment area” of land ice for the Totten Ice Tongue is almost as large as the whole West Antarctic Ice Sheet, so changes in Totten alone could make quite a contribution to sea level rise (and there’s a useful Nature news feature about the “sleeping giant” of Totten here).

How does all this affect us?

Changes in the Antarctic are not the only factor contributing to global sea level rise, of course. Roughly half of the currently observed sea level rise (which is around 3 mm per year total at the moment) comes from thermal expansion of the ocean – as the ocean absorbs heat from the atmosphere, its volume of water expands as it gets warmer.  And changes in other ice sheets and glaciers elsewhere in the world, such as Greenland, also contribute to sea level rise.

Predictions of sea level rise by the year 2100 for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are almost as much as 1 metre from 1990 levels, depending on how much greenhouse gas we continue to add to the atmosphere (and there’s an excellent set of slides explaining those predictions here). But scientists are still trying to understand how ice sheets, particularly in the Antarctic, could contribute to sea level rise.  A recent study suggests that Antarctic ice sheets alone could drive a metre of sea level rise by 2100 (DeConto & Pollard, 2016), while others scientists are examining whether such rapid changes are physically possible (Ritz et al., 2015).

More than 300 million people live in coastal areas already being affected by or at risk of impacts from predicted sea level rise, including 130 coastal cities each with more than 1 million inhabitants.  But sea level rise isn’t the same everywhere, like adding water to a bathtub – instead, its effects will vary on different coasts, for example as water sloshes around the oceans through currents and local variations in gravity.  A new analysis shows which coasts are connected to changes in particular ice sheets – with changes in the Antarctic Peninsula being particularly relevant for Sydney, Australia (Larour et al., 2017; and here’s an interactive website from that research that allows you to explore how different cities are affected by sea level changes from ice in different areas).

Unless we adapt for predicted sea level rise with new defences and relocations, the financial costs in damages from storm surges and coastal flooding each year could total nearly ten percent of the world’s Gross Domestic Product by 2100 (Hinkel et al., 2014).  Even if you don’t live near the coast personally, you will be affected by sea level rise through the global economy. So although the processes involved are complex, what’s happening right now in the Antarctic – along with changes in other places where ice drains from land into the ocean – affects us all.

I’d like to thank the BBC Natural History Unit’s Blue Planet II team for the opportunity to join their Antarctic expedition, and the ship’s crew, sub team, and expedition members aboard the  Alucia, whose hard work gave us a new view of life on the ocean floor around Antarctica, and the chance to collect some more data to help scientists understand how the environment is changing there.

There are days when I love my job, & today was one of them, thanks to the hard work of the whole team aboard the research ship #Alucia pic.twitter.com/mTb5Mk9Pjr

— Dr Jon Copley (@expeditionlog) December 14, 2016

The post Exploring environmental changes in the Antarctic with Blue Planet II appeared first on Exploring our Oceans .

Following previous blog posts discussing the possible environmental impacts of seafloor mining at hydrothermal vents, and examining the UN International Seabed Authority, this blog post will look at who is investing in the company developing the first deep-sea vent mine.

Shares in Nautilus Minerals are traded on the Canadian Stock exchange, and the investment interests of major shareholders are represented by their nominated Non-Executive Directors on the Board of the company. This post will therefore piece together information about major shareholders, tracing their subsidiary and holding company relationships using information from publicly available sources.

We’ll also have a look at where contracts for technology and services relating to the planned Papua New Guinea operations have now been placed. As a result, this post will be quite heavily peppered with links to the sources of each piece of information, in an attempt just to bring together some facts.

“Joint Venture” agreement with Papua New Guinea

On 11 December 2014, Nautilus Minerals overcame the final hurdle in preparation for mining hydrothermal vents at Solwara-1 near the coast of Papua New Guinea. A promised investment of $113 million from the Papua New Guinea government was released from escrow to Nautilus, and a Joint Venture formally created between Nautilus Minerals and a company representing the Papua New Guinea government, to administer the deep-sea mining.

Under the terms of the Joint Venture agreement, 70% of profits from the deep-sea mining will go to Nautilus Minerals, and 30% will ultimately go to the government of Papua New Guinea.  So under those 30-70 terms of the Joint Venture agreement, for every $1 of profit that Nautilus receives from seafloor mining at Solwara-1, the government of Papua New Guinea will receive ~$0.42 on behalf of its 7.1 million people.

(At the moment, the deal is initially 85-15 in Nautilus’s favour; Papua New Guinea’s government has the option to increase its share to 30% if it makes further investment – but let’s assume 70-30, as the maximum that the government of Papua New Guinea will realise from the Joint Venture).

But where would that money go next, if Nautilus’s profits become dividends to its shareholder investors?

Major shareholders in Nautilus Minerals

Nautilus Minerals currently has three major shareholders (figures here are as of 5th October 2015): mining giant Anglo American Plc has a 5.99% stake; a company called Metalloinvest Holding (Cyprus) Ltd has a 20.89% stake; and another company called Manwarid Mining LLC now has a 28.14% stake.

The latter two are the start of chains that lead further afield: to Oman in the case of Manwarid Mining, and to a Russian oligarch and his billionaire associates in the case of Metalloinvest.

(click to enlarge)

To Russia with love

Metalloinvest Holdings (Cyprus) Holdings Ltd is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Metalloinvest JSC, which is in turn is a subsidiary of USM Holdings. USM Holdings is the company that manages the assets of one of Russia’s richest oligarchs, Alisher Usmanov. USM Holdings has three major shareholders: Alisher Usmanov himself owns 48% of stock, with other beneficiaries currently including Vladimir Skoch (30%) and Farhad Moshiri (10%).

Overall, these arrangements make Alisher Usmanov one of the the largest personal stakeholders in Nautilus Minerals. Indeed, his company Metalloinvest’s website lists Nautilus Minerals as an “auxilliary business”.

Alisher Usmanov lives in the UK (he owns Sutton Place in Surrey, previously a home of J. P. Getty) and made his fortune from plastic bags, cigarette imports, iron ore, telecoms and media. He currently owns a stake in Arsenal football club, and recently bought James Watson’s Nobel Prize medal at auction to return it to him.

Out of every $1 realised as dividends to Nautilus shareholders, Usmanov could personally receive up to $0.08 as gross income, before any taxes and costs are applied along the chain of companies leading to him.

The other two major shareholders in USM Holdings are Vladimir Skoch and Farhad Moshiri. Vladimir Skoch is the octogenarian father of pro-Putin politician Andrei Skoch, one of the richest members of Russia’s Duma parliament.

Being a member of the Duma prevents Andrei Skoch from holding any shares personally, but out of every $1 realised as dividends to Nautilus shareholders, his family could receive up to $0.05 gross.

Ardavan Farhad Moshiri is Chairman of the Board of Directors of USM Holdings, in which he also has a 10% shareholding for his service to Usmanov. Moshiri studied accountancy at University College London, and worked for several accountancy firms in the UK, where he came into contact with Usmanov before going to work for him.

Out of every $1 realised as dividends to Nautilus shareholders, Moshiri could receive up to $0.017 as gross income (based on information available about shareholding in the holding companies at the time of writing).

Moshiri has been a director representing Usmanov’s interests in many companies over the past ten years, including Non-Executive Director of Nautilus Minerals from 2007 to 2009. The current Non-Executive Director of Nautilus Minerals representing Metalloinvest’s interests is Mark Horn, a barrister and financial analyst who lives in the UK.

The Oman connection

Manwarid Mining LLC, which now holds a 28% stake in Nautilus Minerals, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of MB Holding Company LLC. MB Holding LLC is based in Oman, and its billionaire founder and Chairman is Mohammed Al Barwani, who also currently serves as a Non-Executive Director of Nautilus Minerals.  MB Holding LLC has considerable subsidiary interests in the oil and gas sector, in addition to mining.

Coincidentally, the Omani oil sector in general has historic ties with China, having been the first Gulf state to supply the People’s Republic in the 1960s. But there is no suggestion of a link between Manwarid Mining or MB Holding and China.

Enter the dragon

So far we’ve looked at companies that are shareholders in Nautilus Minerals.  But who owns the contractors that are now providing technology or services relating to vent mining operations at Solwara-1?

The contract to build the deep-sea mining ship required by Nautilus has been placed with Fujian Mawei Shipbuilding Ltd in China (and a ceremony to mark the first steel-cutting in that project took place last week), via an intermediary company in Dubai.

Nautilus has signed an agreement for ore mined at Solwara-1 to be shipped for processing in China by Tongling Nonferrous Metals Group Co. Ltd.

In early 2015 , a Chinese company also bought SMD Machines, a company based in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, who have the contract to design and build the seafloor mining machines that will be used at Solwara-1.

Mawei Shipbuilding, Tongling Nonferrous Metals, and China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation (parent company of CSR Times Electric, which now owns SMD Machines in Newcastle) are all Chinese state-owned enterprises.  So China effectively now has a major interest in deep-sea mining at Solwara-1, through the contracts providing the production ship, seafloor machinery, and ore processing.

The post WHO ARE SOME OF THE INVESTORS & CONTRACTORS INVOLVED IN DEVELOPING THE WORLD’S 1ST DEEP-SEA VENT MINE? appeared first on Exploring our Oceans .

Always in a Chief Scientist’s mind at sea is the question “what will we do if…”. Those “what ifs” include the weather, medical situations, and problems with any piece of equipment, from the ship’s own hardware to the various tools that we put into the ocean. I’ve never been on an expedition where we were able to stick to “Plan A”, and it sometimes seems like we have more contingency plans than there are letters in the alphabet.

The loss of a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) or autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is utterly crushing for those aboard a research expedition and their colleagues ashore.  But whenever we send something into the ocean depths, there is never an absolute guarantee that it will come back. There is always a risk involved, although we minimise risk through preparation and manage it in our expedition plans.

The only way to avoid risk completely is not to go at all; some risk will always be there, and that means that sometimes the dice will not roll in our favour. That does not mean we are reckless: an assessment of risk-versus-return is typically part of the funding decision for projects, and our back-up plans are usually carefully scrutinised.

To obtain some kinds of knowledge – particularly when physical samples are required for analysis – there is no alternative to sending equipment into the deep ocean, because the ocean’s watery veil masks its depths from many forms of “remote sensing”. And although we have learned a lot from a century or so of largely “blind sampling” by equipment such as trawls and seabed corers (which are still fine for answering some questions in some areas), we now often require more detailed sampling and surveying, using deep-sea vehicles, to answer further questions.

Here is a quick history of some of the remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that have been lost in the service of deep-sea exploration – but also what they had achieved, and how the research in which they were involved has continued. Expeditions have continued in the immediate aftermath of such incidents, using other equipment aboard, and in the longer term, replacement and rebuilt vehicles have achieved scientific successes.

We press on, for reasons including the potential benefits that the ocean holds for our future, from new materials to medicines, and to understand our impact on the future of the ocean.  So the motto is “ever onwards and downwards”.

HROV Nereus (10 May 2014; Kermadec Trench)

Nereus was a new kind of “hybrid” vehicle, combining ROV and AUV technology into an efficient and cost-effective tool for reaching “hadal” depths, i.e. into the deep trenches, where most other vehicles cannot go. Nereus had already reached the ocean’s deepest point in the Marianas Trench, and more recently dived on the world’s deepest known undersea vents in the Cayman Trough.

The current HADES expedition has provided stunning insights into the Kermadec Trench, and will be able to continue using other tools aboard, such as benthic landers.

Autonomous Benthic Explorer (aka ABE; 5th March 2010; Chile Triple Junction)

ABE was one of the first AUVs to be used routinely for science, coming into service in the mid-1990s and completing 221 missions, including pinpointing hydrothermal vents south of the equator in the Atlantic, and obtaining the first seafloor images of a hydrothermal vent field on the SW Indian Ridge (which my colleagues and I then dived on with an ROV in 2011).  The experience gained from developing and operating ABE has also fed into the next generation of AUVs for further ocean exploration.

Isis ROV (19 January 2011; Bransfield Strait, Antarctica)

A day I won’t forget, as one of the team aboard the ship. One year previously, we had used the Isis ROV to study the southernmost known “black smoker” vents in astounding detail. Isis had also surveyed deep-sea canyons off the coast of Portugal, and discovered king crabs creeping up from deep waters towards the Antarctic continental shelf.

The loss of Isis was a major blow, but that expedition continued, using other tools such as a towed camera sled and corers, discovering yet more hydrothermal vents in a seafloor crater near the South Sandwich Islands, investigating volcanic ridges near the Antarctic Peninsula, and revealing how worms boost the flux of iron from deep-sea sediments into Antarctic waters. Those results were a testimony to the leadership of the expedition’s Chief Scientist, Prof Paul Tyler, and the adaptability of the technician team aboard.

(timelapse of ROV Isis rebuild by Jackie Pearson, National Oceanography Centre)

The decision to repair the Isis ROV facility following that expedition was not taken lightly, but the underwater vehicle is not the entire facility, which also includes the shipboard control centre, ROV winch system, and not least the people who operate the facility; so overall, the cost of restoring the vehicle was a fraction of the existing investment in the facility. In the interim, UK expeditions requiring an ROV used Germany’s Kiel6000 ROV through international arrangements for sharing such equipment. A fully restored Isis ROV facility then returned to the Antarctic deep-sea vents in December 2012, and since then has dived on the world’s deepest known undersea vents in the Cayman Trough, and investigated deep-sea corals across the Atlantic.

Autosub-2 AUV (16 February 2005; beneath Fimbul Ice Shelf, Antarctica)

The vast cavities beneath the permanent floating ice shelves that form a fringe around Antarctica and Greenland are some of the few places that only autonomous underwater vehicles can reach. The ice shelves themselves are hundreds of metres thick, and can be hundreds of kilometres long, with water several thousand metres deep beneath them. What goes on in those cavities could be important for understanding the formation of deep waters that sink from polar regions to drive ocean circulation, and they could also be home to unusual colonies of marine life.

Drilling holes through ice shelves and lowering sensors into the hidden ocean below can provide some data, but only in single locations, and at considerable cost in establishing a remote field station on the ice shelf, with all the equipment and fuel required to melt holes down through it. Meanwhile, ROVs can’t reach far into the cavities from the open ocean because of their tethers, so AUVs are potentially the best tools to survey these environments. The Autosub Under Ice programme was therefore designed to explore the marine environment beneath permanent floating ice shelves using the Autosub-2 AUV.

Analysis of previous AUV missions indicated that the risk of losing Autosub-2 during a >100 km mission beneath an ice shelf could be >50%. Consequently, potential insurers of marine equipment quoted an insurance premium equivalent to 95% of the vehicle’s cost, per year! So instead, the programme set aside funds to build a replacement vehicle, and began construction of it, fully expecting that one would be lost.

And indeed it was. Autosub-2 completed its first mission beneath the Fimbul Ice Shelf in the Antarctic, obtaining the first synoptic data from an ice-shelf cavity, but was lost on its second mission (consistent with a ~50% expected risk of loss). However, its replacement was already under construction, and Autosub-3 later completed missions beneath the ice shelf of Pine Island Glacier to understand changes previously observed there from satellite data, and is being used in further ice-shelf studies.

Kaiko ROV (29 May 2003; near Shikoku island)

In 1995, Kaiko – which means “ocean trench” – became the first vehicle to return to the deepest point of the oceans since the record-breaking dive of the Trieste in 1960. Kaiko dived there again in 1996 and 1998, completing more than 20 dives in total to “Challenger Deep” and collecting specimens of amphipod crustaceans, microbes, and sediments. The ROV was also used in the discovery of hydrothermal vents on the Central Indian Ridge in 2000. But in 2003, Kaiko was lost on its 296th dive as Typhoon Chan-Hom closed in towards the research ship RV Kairei.

The “launcher” component of Kaiko, which was recovered, was subsequently combined with the UROV7k vehicle to create Kaiko7000II, with a 7 km depth capability.  Meanwhile, the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) has also developed the ABISMO ROV as replacement for Kaiko to reach the deepest point of the oceans – and ABISMO has so far operated successfully to a depth of 9707 metres in the Izu-Ogasawara Trench.

– Jon Copley, 11 May 2014

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Deep-sea hydrothermal vents are one of the seafloor environments now being targeted for mining of their mineral resources, because the “chimneys” that form at vents are particularly rich in metals such as copper that we need for modern technology.

But what are the possible impacts on marine life from mining at deep-sea vents?  For the first of three blog posts to accompany Week 6 of our “Massive Open Online Course” on “Exploring our oceans”, I’ll attempt a summary here, because the impact of greatest concern on marine life is perhaps not the most obvious.  And because it’s perhaps not obvious, this will be long article – starting with some key features of deep-sea vents, and what mining at vents will involve.

What are the key features of deep-sea vents?

Deep-sea vents are undersea hot springs, where mineral-rich fluid gushes out of the ocean floor.  On contact with cold, oxygenated seawater, the minerals in those hot fluids precipitate to build spire-like deposits called “vent chimneys”, and sometimes produce a “black smoke” of suspended particles that rises and disperses above the vents.

Deep-sea vents occur in “vent fields”, each of which is a collection of vent chimneys clustered together in a relatively small area.  Vent fields vary in size: some are just a couple of hundred metres across, while at others the vent chimneys can be spread over several kilometres.

Vent fields are separated from each other on the seafloor by relatively large distances where there is no vent activity.  In some regions, vent fields can be a few kilometres apart from each other, but in other regions it can be several hundred kilometres from one vent field to its nearest neighbour.  So overall, vent fields are rather like “islands”, dotted around the ocean floor, and varying in size and spacing.

The activity of each vent field does not last forever.  Depending on their geological setting, some vent fields may only be active for a few decades, before their fluid flow shuts down, for example if the area is smothered by lava flows from nearby undersea volcanoes, or if the “plumbing” beneath the vent field is disrupted by earthquake activity.  In other regions, however, a vent field can remain active for thousands of years – and go through cycles of activity, switching “on and off” for several millennia at a time.

So this is a key point that we will come back to later: deep-sea vents are not the same the world over.  Some are smaller in area than others, and some are naturally active for thousands of years.

At active vents, microbes thrive by using some of the dissolved minerals in the vent fluids as an energy source, in a process known as “chemosynthesis”.  These microbes in turn provide food for species of deep-sea animals, many of which are only found in such “chemosynthetic” islands of life on the ocean floor.

However, those animal species are never unique to an individual vent field, because if they were, they would go extinct when that vent field shuts down naturally.  The “vent” animals therefore have larval stages in their life cycles that are adapted for dispersal between vent fields, which allow them to avoid extinction despite the ultimately ephemeral nature of the colonies of their adult forms.

Although vent species are not unique to individual vent fields, however, they are specific to particular regions – one species, for example, may be found at vents along 3000 km of mid-ocean ridge, and then either geological or oceanographic barriers may isolate it from other species at vents in neighbouring regions.

So this is another key point that we will come back to later: vent fields are naturally ephemeral, and may be inhabited by species of animals only found at vent fields in a particular region, but never only at one individual vent field.

What is involved in mining at vents?

From plans already made by mining companies, “mineral extraction” will involve machines on the seafloor scraping up and pulverising the “seafloor massive sulfide” (SMS) deposits at a vent field, i.e. the vent chimneys and associated rubble around them.

This material will be pumped to a surface facility, where the metals will be extracted.  The remaining matter will be turned into a slurry, and in some cases may be pumped back down into the depths, to disperse from a pipe in mid-water and eventually settle across a wide area of the seafloor at very low concentration, similar to the fall-out from the natural plume of particles dispersing from the vents themselves.

What marine life will be most affected?

Now let’s think about the marine life that is likely to be most affected by mining at deep-sea vents.  Mining on land has an impact on local wildlife, but on land that wildlife usually occupies habitats much larger than just the area being mined.  So although some garden snails or earthworms may be killed by an excavation on land, that impact doesn’t usually cause concern, because those species are still common in unaffected areas.

So it is important to make a distinction between “normal” deep-sea animals that are found in extensive habitats beyond deep-sea vents, and “vent” animals that are only found in vent environments.

The plume of particle-laden waste water from seafloor mining could have an impact on “normal” deep-sea animals, for example suspension-feeding corals living on rocky seafloor away from the vents, or mid-water animals if the plume clouds the water (remember that many deep-sea animals still use light to communicate, hunt, and evade predators, even at depths beyond on the reach of sunlight).

But those kinds of animals usually have very wide distributions away from vents in the deep sea, so in terms of habitat loss or species extinction they are not particularly at risk from mining at vents; the impacts on them are similar to those on the garden snails and earthworms of our land-mining analogy.  The same applies to animals that may be affected by noise or other disturbance from mining activity, if their species have wide distributions and large populations beyond the impact area.

How will “vent” animals be affected?

But what about the impacts on the “vent” animals, which only live in vent environments?  The animals living on vent chimneys macerated by the mining machines will be killed.  But vent fields are naturally ephemeral features: when a vent field shuts down naturally, all the animals living there die out.  So mining, it is argued, simulates a natural disturbance process at an individual vent field.

In fact, mining does not “switch off” activity at a vent field; instead, it effectively resets the vent field to “time zero” in its natural development, by scraping the seafloor back to bare basalt with hot fluid still gushing out of it.  We know that the larvae of “vent” animals can recolonise that site from other vent fields in the region, because they did so when venting at that site first began (though how variable larval supply is, and whether a community will always follow the same pattern of development, is not yet known for vent fields in many regions).  And the chimneys grow back too (for example, we have seen chimneys grow several metres in a year between visits to some sites).

So on the face of it, mining at vents might seem an attractive proposition (and the word “sustainable” has even been used by some to describe it).  But as is often the case in the natural world, issues arise when we consider cumulative effects across a region, rather than individual sites.

What are the risks to “vent” animals from mining?

In the Western Pacific, where plans for mining at vents are arguably most advanced, most of the vent fields are associated with “back-arc spreading”, rather than being found on mid-ocean ridges.  These “back-arc” vent fields can be extensive, for example stretching over kilometres of seafloor in a ring around the summit of an underwater volcano.

At many of these “back-arc” vent fields, it is possible to mine just one part of the vent field, while creating “set-asides” or “reserves” within the same vent field or area, from which animals can recolonise the mined area afterwards.

That is exactly what mining company Nautilus Minerals proposes to do at the Solwara-1 vent field near Papua New Guinea, and they have worked extensively with scientists in the US to understand patterns of gene flow and thereby define what should be effective reserve areas as sources for recolonisation.

Looking at those plans as an independent observer, I think they will work in terms of mitigating the impact on “vent” animals.  The mined area should recover, with chimneys regrowing and “vent” animals recolonising them.

But – and it is a very big “but” – not all the vent fields on mid-ocean ridges are like the “back-arc” vent field of Solwara-1.  At mid-ocean ridges, would-be seafloor miners are targeting vent fields on “slower-spreading” ridges, such as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and SW Indian Ridge.  Vent fields on a slower-spreading ridges are often much less extensive in size than “back-arc” vent fields such as Solwara-1, and each vent field on a slower-spreading ridge is typically active for several millennia.

The TAG hydrothermal mound on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, for example, is one of the largest known mid-ocean ridge sulfide deposits, but its main active mound is only ~200 metres across, unlike the chimneys spread over kilometres at Solwara-1.  And the TAG mound has been active for at least 20 000 years, in cycles of activity and inactivity each lasting 4000 to 5000 years, revealed by “geochronology” of its mineral deposits.

So at the smaller vent fields on mid-ocean ridges, it is not feasible to create “set-aside” or “reserve” areas within a vent field that is being mined: it will be “all-or-nothing” for that particular vent field, considering the footprint required for machinery on the seafloor.  And most importantly: the natural rate of vent-field-wide disturbance on slower-spreading ridges, to which their marine life may be adapted, seems to be once every few millennia.

What we don’t yet know on slower-spreading ridges is how rapidly a colony of “vent” animals develops from “time zero” to become identical to the well-established colonies that we have found so far.  We have not yet found a vent field close to “time zero” on a slower-spreading ridge: the ones we have seen so far have large mineral deposits, indicating that they have been active for some time, and their ecology has remained largely unchanged over the decades that scientists have been visiting them, unlike shorter-lived vent fields elsewhere in the world.  If early stage vent fields on slower-spreading ridges have a different ecology, then mining of several vent fields in a region could reduce the habitat available for species that only inhabit mature colonies.

So this the main impact of concern for “vent” animals: if mining “resets” vent fields in a region at a much higher rate than they “reset” naturally, then we could see overall habitat loss for some “vent” species particular to that region, and ultimately an increased extinction risk for those species as a result of our activities.  So what really matters will be the rate at which we disturb these systems by mining, across a region, compared with their natural rate of disturbance at vent-field scale, and the rate of response of animal colonies to such disturbances on slow-spreading mid-ocean ridges, which we don’t yet know at vent-field scale.

What can be done to reduce the risk of habitat loss and species extinction at vents on slow-spreading mid-ocean ridges?

The most obvious answer to that question is “not to mine those vents”; however, as I will discuss in a further post, the decision has already been made (on behalf of all of us, yet seemingly without us being asked).

If mining goes ahead at active vents on slow-spreading mid-ocean ridges, it is therefore essential that it is carefully controlled at a regional scale, for example identifying a network of vents in a region that must be conserved to ensure viable “metapopulations” of species to recolonise mined sites.  And it will take considerably more research and exploration to inform such an approach in each region.

There is also an alternative at this point: for every “active” vent field on a slow-spreading mid-ocean ridge, there are probably at least ten inactive vent fields, where venting has ceased naturally but where the vent chimneys have not yet been buried by sediments.  As venting has ceased at these sites, the “vent” animals have moved on – but the metal-rich mineral deposits remain.  So potentially, it might be possible to mine inactive vent fields on slow-spreading mid-ocean ridges without the impacts on “vent” animals that we have considered here.

(Recent research shows that marine life at inactive vents can still benefit from chemosynthesis at nearby active vents, but the species involved are “normal” deep-sea animals, typically with wide distributions beyond inactive vents, so they may be similar to the earthworms and snails of our land-mining analogy).

Inactive vent fields may be less attractive to would-be miners, however, because they are harder to find.  We find active vent fields thanks to the plume of mineral-rich fluids gushing out of them, but inactive vent fields lack those tell-tale signals.  But it could still be possible to restrict mining of vents on mid-ocean ridges in international waters to inactive sites.

Whatever the future, effective regulation will be essential for vent mining; and in my next post, we’ll take a look at the organisation that already exists to regulate vent mining in international waters. And then in the final post, we’ll also take a look at some of the investors and contractors involved in developing the world’s first deep-sea vent mine, in the territorial waters of Papua New Guinea.

– Jon Copley (original post March 2014; updated October 2015)

Supplemental, July 2014:

Two further items relevant to this post, in recent weeks:

(1) At the Council of the United National International Seabed Authority (ISA; responsible for administering seafloor mining in international waters) in July 2014, the Netherlands submitted a note recommending that the ISA consider establishing regional environmental impact assessments before awarding any “exploitation” contracts for seafloor mining.  Such a measure, if eventually adopted by the ISA, could address the concerns about “cumulative” impacts of mining at deep-sea vents described here.  So let’s watch this space…

(2) Andrew Thaler and colleagues have recently published an analysis of how connected some populations of animals are between deep-sea vents (which Andrew discusses eloquently in a post here).  Surprisingly, their new study shows that  a “non-vent” animal (Munidopsis squat lobsters, found in lots of deep-sea environments other than just hydrothermal vents) shows greater genetic sub-division than populations of Chorocaris shrimp (which are only known from “chemosynthetic” environments such as deep-sea vents) among deep-sea vents in different areas.  So the assertion in the post above that we should be less concerned about mining impacts on “non-vent” animals, because they can live in areas away from vents, may not actually hold true in all cases…

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