Almost unnoticed, in May, during the first weeks of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a new era in man’s exploitation of the oceans began. The Chinese government lodged an application with the United Nations to mine for minerals on a ridge 1,700 metres down in the south-west Indian Ocean, outside any individual nation’s jurisdiction. It is the first application of its kind for mining in international waters, and so has potentially vast implications — for international law, for the price of metals, and for the marine environment. It is likely to be the first of many.
Experts have expected that someone would want to mine the sea floor since the 1970s. What looked like starting the ball rolling was the mining of manganese deposits — allegedly used by the CIA as cover for the attempted raising of wrecked Soviet submarines. The economics never stacked up and there are eight dormant claims for mining manganese in the Pacific. Now the keen prices for metals such as nickel, cobalt and tellurium, used in computers, batteries, mobile phones and military applications, have made the Chinese think that it is worth the many billions of yuan that it would take to establish and mine a claim on the sea bed. Asia’s manufacturing nations want security of supply and steady prices for the raw materials presently found within the borders of corrupt African democracies, failed states and dictatorships.
China wants to mine a rich layer of sulphide deposits in an area of hydrothermal vents — geysers driven by volcanic activity. Exploration in the central Pacific with remotely operated underwater vehicles has shown that sulphide deposits around hydrothermal vents can contain ores ten times richer than any left unexploited on land. Indeed, the richest deposits of copper known to the ancient world, on Cyprus, are now thought to have come from hydrothermal vents that ended up above sea level.
The area of allegedly now inactive hydrothermal vents, found by the Chinese only three years ago, is known to contain metals such as copper, nickel, trace metals such as cobalt, as well as gold and silver. It is, literally, a gold mine. A company called Nautilus is thought to be closest to the prize of opening up deposits of this kind in the deep sea, in the waters of Papua New Guinea. But it is the mining of international waters that will get the environmental community sitting up and paying attention.
When hydrothermal vents were first discovered in the Galapagos Rift in 1977, what surprised scientists was that the tall chimneys on the floor of the Pacific, billowing what looked like black smoke, were teeming with extraordinary, unexpected marine life. There were unknown mussels, anemones, whelks, limpets, featherduster worms, snails, lobsters, brittle stars and blind white crabs as well as strange jellyfish that looked like dandelions but were related to a Portuguese man-of-war. There were giant clams with blood-red flesh and red-tipped tubeworms eight feet long which had no mouths or stomachs and existed on the bacteria they contained. Hotter geysers were found to contain organisms that could exist in total darkness and in water temperatures of more than 100˚C. The sea floor, which had been thought to be dark, cold and inhospitable, had turned out to be one of the most fertile places on Earth. There were unique species nestling at the mouth of furnaces in which the earth’s richest mineral ores were in the process of formation.
In staking their claim to the deposits of the south-west Indian Ocean, the Chinese have played it by the book. They made an application to the International Seabed Authority, the UN institution set up under the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), to deal with the liabilities, potential environmental damage and eventual payback to the owners of the resource. For under UN law, the sea minerals in international waters are held to be the common heritage of all mankind. The benefits are supposed to be distributed to developing countries — through a mechanism that has yet to be negotiated. The Jamaica-based authority will discuss the application, and any others that turn up before then, at a meeting next April. The mechanisms exist to manage and establish liability, even for mining in the deep sea, according to Michael Lodge, legal adviser to the Authority. ‘The more profound question,’ he adds, ‘is whether we should be doing it at all.’
The beginning of mining activities on the ocean floor is pretty momentous stuff, but in fact there have been events throughout the decade which have changed our perceptions of the sea and its relative importance to mankind more than any since Darwin sailed to the Galapagos. If you think that is a big claim, and you still think of the oceans as just blank areas on the map, stack up the following discoveries.
A decade-long census of marine life has so far found some 5,600 new species, including whole new ecosystems, around hydrothermal vents, in the Coral Sea, and under the Antarctic ice. In the same period, some of the biggest threats the sea has yet faced from human activity have been identified. In 2002 scientists reported that the world’s catches of wild fish had peaked, and had been on the way down since 1989 (that finding had been obscured, ironically, by Chinese mis-reporting). From that moment, over-fishing leapt on to the agenda as one of the world’s most serious problems, with the headline story of the decade being the mismanagement of sharks and bluefin tuna.
In the same year, 2002, scientists from Plymouth Marine Laboratory told a conference on climate change in Exeter that the naturally alkaline state of the world’s oceans was becoming more acid as the result of absorption of raised levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is believed this will eventually have potentially disastrous consequences for organisms which make their shells or skeletons out of calcium — which includes plankton, fish and shellfish. The Royal Society’s comprehensive overview of ocean acidification in 2005 pointed out that the threshold at which fossil fuel emissions cause damage appears to be lower in the sea than in the atmosphere.
No wonder people are worried about the oceans. As Sue Lieberman, deputy director of the Pew Environment Group, says, ‘You might ask why it didn’t happen sooner. The sea is 70 per cent of the planet’s surface. We’ve exploited everything else. We are really messing up the sea and we are waking up and realising that it isn’t endless as we have been inclined to believe. A number of organisations are banging the drum and maybe people are listening.’
One of the ways the environmental community have been responding is by doing some prospecting of their own. They have been identifying areas which might lend themselves to being the sea’s great national parks, like the African game reserves in the 1890s, where representative ecosystems could be preserved for the future. One of these was in the north Pacific, where the departing president George W. Bush declared what was then the world’s largest marine reserve. This was trumped by the departing Labour administration in Britain, which declared its intention to make the 200 miles around the coral atolls of the Chagos archipelago in the Indian Ocean an even larger reserve, off-limits to fishing. The new coalition has yet to confirm formally that it has the same intention.
Though their time has undoubtedly come, marine reserves will not solve all the sea’s problems. Experts have been looking at those problems and the potential for conflict ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit in 2012, which will also be the 30th anniversary of the ratification of t he UN law of the sea. It would be the appropriate moment to make reforms. So what needs to be done?
Most eyes will be drawn to the unfolding disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and the implications of oil extraction in other extreme environments. The greatest area of potential expansion for conventional oil extraction, because of the shales known to hold oil, is in the Arctic. There are thought to be vast reserves under the winter ice and in less than 50 metres of water. Expansion into the Arctic is on hold in America because of the environmental damage it might cause. There is the same potential for damage, with fewer controls, when Russia begins to exploit the known potential north of Siberia in the Kara Sea. The technical problems of coping with floating ice for part of the year are not yet resolved but, legally speaking, the liabilities and responsibilities are fairly clear, as most of the oil is on the continental shelf.
Where things get interesting is that there are vast claims filed with the UN to expand sovereignty over continental shelves — most notably by Britain, which has a claim to some of the largest areas on earth thanks to its many island dependencies. There are some disputed claims to territory between the US and Russia, Greenland and Canada, but by and large sovereignty and liability for exploration is clear, because it mostly happens in territorial waters. So it is difficult to see why Russia chose to plant a flag 14,000 feet below the North Pole in 2007 to advance its claims. In the prevailing scramble for territory, though, it looks perverse that the US still has not ratified the UN treaty which might strengthen its case.
It is hard not to reach the conclusion that where rules are worked out in advance of any attempt at exploitation, the UN’s law of the sea has worked. The best regulated activities are those that haven’t actually happened yet — such as China’s attempt to claim mineral rights in the deep sea. Where the law hasn’t worked is where there is an attempt to strengthen rules or enforcement after the event, when vested interests already exist.
The classic case is the disaster that is the world’s fisheries, where the international system has invariably moved too slowly and too late. Eighty per cent of the world’s fisheries are now fully exploited or already depleted. The targets for most of the blame are the regional fisheries management organisations, the RFMOs, which preside over fisheries on the high seas outside national control. The tuna organisation in the Atlantic, ICCAT, stands accused of presiding over the near annihilation of the bluefin tuna. The tuna organisation in the Indian Ocean has responded to concern about skipjack and yellowfin stocks by finally saying it will impose quotas — but only in 2012. The London-based North East Atlantic Fisheries Commission stands by powerless while a mackerel war goes on between Iceland and the EU. And as a new report this week shows, vessels from Spain and other nations regularly ignore NEAFC’s requirement to report catches of highly vulnerable species from the deep sea.
A number of experts believe the 40-year record of the regional fisheries organisations is so bad it is time to start again. Michael Lodge was on an independent panel of Chatham House which reached that conclusion. He says: ‘There are no best practices. The model doesn’t work. We have to find another way of doing it.’ The panel recommended a more globalised system, using accepted international standards to bring the RFMOs up to scratch. The global common sea will have to become more like the land, with clearer rights and responsibilities. That will need a vast injection of political will.
Charles Clover is editor of Fish2fork and a trustee of the Blue Marine Foundation.