ON 2 AUGUST 2007, bright light shone on the ocean floor beneath the North Pole for the first time, as a van-sized submarine settled on the seabed. Inside, pilot Anatoly Sagalevich deployed a mechanical arm to erect a Russian flag. That act stirred up more than the yellow-tinged polar sediments.
“This isn’t the 15th century: you can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say we’re claiming this territory,” said Canada’s foreign minister, Peter MacKay. Russia countered that the flag-planting was merely to celebrate their achievement – like taking a flag to the moon. “The goal of this expedition is not to stake out Russia’s rights, but to prove that our [continental] shelf stretches up to the North Pole,” said Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov. In 2015, Russia used data from the expedition to support a claim to seabed resources in 1.3 million square kilometres around the pole.
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This may look like a latter-day land grab but it is actually a move in line with international laws built on a vision of the ocean floor being “common heritage”. Russia isn’t alone in claiming resources on the Arctic seabed, and nations are seeking to extend their rights to ocean resources elsewhere. Meanwhile, commercial enterprises are gearing up to mine deep-sea mineral deposits.
We have come to a crucial moment for the future of our blue planet. As international bodies prepare to decide about the legitimacy of different mining ventures and how to protect biodiversity in the waters beyond national boundaries, the race is on for deep-sea biologists like myself to understand how these decisions will affect ecosystems on the ocean floor.
Working out who has rights to what is the easy part, at least in principle. The rules determining rights on the ocean floor are collectively known as the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. UNCLOS was agreed through conferences that spanned decades, and has been signed by 167 nations and the European Union. It gives countries with a coastline a zone of “territorial waters” extending 12 nautical miles (22 kilometres) offshore. They own the resources within that area, such as fisheries and minerals, but ships of any other nation have the right of peaceful passage.
Coastal countries are also granted an “exclusive economic zone” (EEZ), with further rights to resources extending out to 200 nautical miles (370 kilometres) offshore. For both territorial waters and the EEZ, if there is an overlap with the zones for another country, the nations involved must agree a boundary. In practice, the area is usually divided down the middle.
All this helps explain disputes over the sovereignty of specks of land such as the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. Any country that can claim an island potentially gets the territorial waters and EEZ around it – and may also reduce the zones of other countries if there is an overlap.
It doesn’t explain what’s happening in the Arctic, though. Rights to that territory are determined by additional rules agreed in UNCLOS. These allow countries to claim rights to sea-floor mineral resources out to either 350 nautical miles (648 kilometres) from their coast, or 100 nautical miles (185 kilometres) beyond the 2500 metre depth contour where the sea floor slopes away from the land, whichever applies first.
“21 million tonnes
manganese consumption ()”
According to these rules, a country must submit a case with geological evidence and detailed sea-floor maps showing that the area is an extension of its continental shelf. In the Arctic, a relatively shallow stretch of sea floor called the Lomonosov Ridge runs across the ocean basin. Russia, Canada and Denmark, by way of Greenland, can all claim that this feature extends their continental shelves into the central Arctic. All three have submitted their cases to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf: Denmark in 2014, Russia in 2015 and Canada in 2018.
“What looks at first glance like this acquisitive scramble for the Arctic, with everyone just claiming what they can, is actually states doing what they’re supposed to do,” says Philip Steinberg, director of the International Boundaries Research Unit at Durham University, UK, “They are submitting the science that UNCLOS tells them to.”
The areas claimed by Russia, Canada and Denmark overlap, so they will have to negotiate boundaries between themselves. But that is a problem for the future. Claims over the Arctic may have been making the headlines, but the same process is happening around the globe and there is a backlog of cases waiting to be reviewed by the UN. “It will be maybe 20 to 30 years before they get to all the submissions that are currently before them – and there are still more coming in,” says Steinberg.
That still leaves a vast expanse of ocean beyond the reach of individual nations. This region, which covers about 46 per cent of Earth’s surface, is known as the “high seas” or “the Area”. In the 1960s, the UN designated the resources here as the “common heritage of mankind”. This principle is the cornerstone of its International Seabed Authority (ISA), created in 1994 to regulate deep-sea mining and ensure that lower-income nations benefit from it. “It is the only organisation that has such a broad mandate over a common property resource,” says Michael Lodge, secretary-general of the ISA, which has its headquarters in Kingston, Jamaica.
“Most resources on the sea floor are deemed ‘common heritage’ for all”
Through the ISA, the UNCLOS signatories have devised rules for the extraction of three different types of mineral deposits in the deep ocean: polymetallic nodules (manganese nodules scattered across sea floor plains), polymetallic sulphides (deposits rich in copper, formed by hydrothermal vents) and cobalt-rich ferromanganese crusts (which form on undersea mountains). Nations can sponsor applications by contractors – either mining companies or research institutions – for exploration licences to map and study the value of a particular type of deposit in an agreed area.
The first exploration licences were issued in 2001. By last year, the tally had reached 30, of which 18 were for manganese nodules, seven for polymetallic sulphides and five for cobalt-rich ferromanganese crusts. Countries involved so far are Russia, South Korea, China, France, Japan, Germany, the UK, India, Poland, Brazil, Singapore, Tonga, Nauru and the Cook Islands. No deep-sea mining has taken place yet, however. That will require a new phase in which exploitation licences are issued.
Some scientists are already calling for a ban on mining active hydrothermal vents – the “black smokers” of TV nature documentary fame. Cindy Van Dover, director of Duke University’s Marine Laboratory in North Carolina, is one of them. In 2018, Van Dover and her colleagues published research calculating that the total sea-floor area of all known active hydrothermal vents is – around half the size of Disney World in Florida, or less than 1 per cent of the size of Yellowstone National Park. “It is a super-rare environment,” she says. Yet that tiny global area is home to more than 400 species of animal not found in any other habitat, which is why she says it needs protection from mining.
The ISA is sympathetic. “If there is a need established for protection of active hydrothermal vents, I don’t think that’s a big problem,” says Lodge. “It’s something that we’re working on.” For every cluster of active hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, gushing out mineral-rich fluid, there are several inactive ones, where venting has naturally ceased and the vent animals have moved on, but the mineral deposits remain for potential sulphide miners.
“30 million tonnes
at all the world’s known hydrothermal vents”
Most of the exploration licences aren’t for sulphides at hydrothermal vents, however. They are for manganese nodules: nuggets the size of new potatoes that contain cobalt, nickel and rare earth elements, as well as manganese, that form over thousands of years on the sea floor. Exploration activity is primarily focused on the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) of the eastern Pacific, which covers 4.5 million square kilometres of silty abyssal plains, punctuated by rolling “abyssal hills”.
The CCZ is 90,000 times the size of the area of all the world’s active hydrothermal vents, which could make mining here a very different prospect. Nevertheless, there is still much we don’t know about it. Just as the environment changes over thousands of kilometres across a continent, the huge area of . Different species flourish in these different areas, which requires a joined-up approach to manage the impacts of activities such as mining. We still don’t know exactly what organisms live where or how they might be disturbed by mining.
For example, seven years ago, when researchers from the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London surveyed the eastern CCZ, they noticed white sponges, just a few millimetres across, on many of the manganese nodules. These turned out to belong to a new genus and species, . It is the most abundant animal living on these nodules in the eastern CCZ, and has since been found across more than 1000 kilometres of the area. Being so widespread, it would probably not be threatened by mining, but other organisms are. Around hydrothermal vents there are 27 species listed as vulnerable or endangered on the . These include four new species of snails, which I and colleagues . It remains to be seen whether any nodule zone species, whose populations cover much larger areas, will join them on that list.
“There has to be honesty and transparency about what will be impacted,” says Adrian Glover, who led the NHM survey team that discovered P. craigi. He points out that large areas of the CCZ have already been designated as reserves, protected from any future mining. These total 1.44 million square kilometres, which is almost six times the size of the UK.
Research into the effects of mining across the CCZ is ongoing. In the next few years, Glover and Dan Jones of the UK’s National Oceanography Centre will lead a project – in which I am also involved – to investigate what happens when a company tests one of its nodule-harvesting machines, which is permitted under current exploration licences. These machines work like a sort of underwater vacuum cleaner, sucking up nodules and stirring up sediment, which can have effects at least 10 kilometres beyond the mine site.
“No exploitation licences have been issued yet, so effectively deep-sea mining is banned until such time that we’ve worked out if it can be done environmentally, economically and legally,” says Glover. Even if the ISA agrees the regulations for exploitation licences in the coming months, would-be miners then have to submit their licence applications for approval, which will include consideration of environmental impacts in each case.
Because deep-sea mining hasn’t yet begun, the ISA also has time to consider how the benefits could be shared with the world’s lower-income nations. One idea is to create a sovereign wealth fund for the ocean, using income from mining areas that each licensee has to release back to the ISA for its “common heritage” goal. “You could use it either to support underfunded global public goods, which could, for example, be marine scientific research,” says Lodge. “Or you could use it to combat global public bads – climate change, for example, by putting it into a climate change adaptation fund.”
This would only apply to profits from non-living resources, though: organisms in the Area aren’t covered by the ISA. As well as fisheries, governed by regional organisations, these also include “marine genetic resources” – the gene pool of the oceans, which has huge potential for biotech and medical applications. This genetic resource is unregulated, but that is set to change. Next year – following a postponement because of coronavirus – the UN is convening the final session of an intergovernmental conference that began in 2018 to draw up a new treaty for biodiversity in the high seas.
Creatures of the deep
Unlike deep-sea mining, exploiting marine genetic resources doesn’t involve large-scale harvesting: a single specimen of an organism can provide a genome for that species. So, sharing any benefits will depend on tracking biological samples and data collected from the high seas. “What you don’t want is something that’s going to end up hampering research,” says Muriel Rabone at the NHM, who has attended the preliminary negotiations. But, she adds, tracking could also help other researchers to continue using collections of deep-sea specimens to answer new questions in the future.
“31 million tonnes
extraction of copper and zinc”
Decades after it was proposed, the principle of common heritage could soon start to pay dividends. While that would be progressive, some scientists think the idea of the high seas as a resource to be exploited is outdated. “The Law of the Sea Convention was drafted in the 80s, on the back of negotiations that took place in the 60s and 70s,” says Harriet Harden-Davies at the University of Wollongong, Australia. “Looking to the future, I think it’s useful to draw some ideas from fresh inspirations.”
In recent years, environmental legislation in some countries and US states has recognised that nature itself has rights: a few countries, such as New Zealand and India, have gone further and recognised rights for specific ecosystems such as rivers and mountains, making them legal entities akin to corporations or people. In June, Harden-Davies and her colleagues rights-of-nature paradigm could be used in developing a new treaty for ocean biodiversity.
“These laws wouldn’t preclude use of ocean resources, but they would really reinforce the principle of precaution,” says Harden-Davies. They would also ensure that some benefits of exploitation flow back into ocean conservation. “And you could have some kind of institutional mechanism, like a Council of Ocean Custodians, that would provide an opportunity for people to speak on behalf of the ocean,” she says. In other words, instead of debating our rights to the oceans, the focus would be on our responsibilities.
