Mining The Ocean Floor

NYT, via Ritholtz:

Scientists once thought the main source of wealth in the deep sea lay in beds of potato-size rocks that could be mined for such common metals as iron and nickel. In the 1960s and ’70s, entrepreneurs tried to scoop them up, but the rewards never offset the high cost of exploration, retrieval and transportation.

Things began to change in 1979 with the discovery of “black smokers”, sulfurous mounds and towers that gush blistering-hot water. The smokers turned out to dot the 46,000 miles of volcanic fissures that gird the global seabed like seams on a baseball.

Scientists found that the smokers formed as hot water rose through the volcanic rocks, hit icy seawater and shed a variety of minerals that slowly coalesced into eerie mounds and chimneys. One, found off Washington State and nicknamed Godzilla, stood more than 15 stories high.

The first wave of discovery showed that the volcanic springs harbored riots of bizarre creatures, including thickets of tube worms. The second wave showed that the mounds and chimneys — hot and cold, new and old, active and inactive — were composed of complex minerals that contained surprising amounts of copper, silver and gold.

Today, increasingly, mines on land lack rich supplies of copper, a staple of modern life found in everything from pipes to computers. Many commercial ores have concentrations of only a half a percent. But seabed explorers have found purities of 10 percent and higher — turning the obscure deposits into potential bonanzas. The same turned out to be true of silver and gold.

People love finding valuable things, even if they are miles under water.  This sounds like a giant headache to me.  I wouldn't want to jump through all the legal hoops, but that's why I'm not involved and these folks are.