Robotics World's First Deep Sea Mining Venture Set to Launch in 2019 Remote-controlled robots will journey to the bottom of the ocean in search of copper, nickel, cobalt, gold, and platinum as global demand for minerals surges.

The world's first deep sea mining operation will kick off in early 2019 when a Canadian firm, Nautilus Minerals Inc., lowers a trio of massive remote-controlled mining robots to the floor of the Bismarck Sea off the coast of Papua New Guinea in pursuit of rich copper and gold reserves. The machines, each the size of a small house, are equipped with rock-crushing teeth resembling the large incisors of a dinosaur. The robots will lumber across the ocean floor on mammoth treads, grinding and chewing the encrusted seabed, sending plumes of sediment into the surrounding waters and killing marine life that gets in their way. The smallest of the robots weighs 200 tons. "A lot of people don't realize that there are more mineral resources on the seafloor than on land," said Michael Johnston, CEO of Nautilus, by phone from the company's field office in Brisbane, Australia. "Technology has allowed us to go there." If Nautilus succeeds, an undersea gold rush could be at hand. Over two-dozen contracts have already been granted to explore hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean floor by a United Nations body called the International Seabed Authority (ISA), which regulates areas of the seafloor that lie outside of any national jurisdiction. "In the seabed, resources are incredibly rich," said Michael Lodge, Secretary-General of the ISA. "These are virgin resources. They're extremely high-grade. And they are super-abundant."

Analysts warn that population growth and a transition to low-carbon economies will test global supply constraints for minerals. Indeed, current levels of mining exploration are not keeping pace with future demand, according to a peer-reviewed paper published in March by a team of researchers led by the University of Delaware's Saleem Ali. The prospect of mineral demand outstripping supply has led an increasing number of firms to consider operations at the bottom of the ocean, where reserves of copper, nickel, and cobalt are thought to be plentiful, along with lesser amounts of gold and platinum. "It's no exaggeration to say that there are thousands of years' supply of minerals in the seabed," Secretary-General Lodge said. "There is just absolutely no shortage." Nautilus says early tests show their Bismark Sea site, called Solwara-1, is over 10-times as rich in copper as comparable land-based mines, with a copper grade above 7 percent versus an average 0.6 percent grade on land. The site also boasts over 20 grams per ton of gold, versus an average grade of 6 grams per ton on land. RELATED: 'Casper' Octopus Could Be Threatened by Deep Sea Mining Many of the world's best options for surface mining have long since been explored and developed, according to Thomas Graedel, an industrial ecologist at Yale University. "The planet has been extensively explored on land," he said by phone from New Haven. "I think industry will continue to want to explore for new potential deposits of minerals." Indeed, mining the ocean floor has been under consideration for decades, but seen as a remote possibility. In one famous case in 1974, the CIA used a fake ocean floor mining expedition, ostensibly backed by the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, as cover for an attempt to hoist a sunken Soviet submarine off the coast of Hawaii. But now, the practice is shifting from fantasy to reality — a fact that is causing alarm among environmental groups who argue that not enough research has been done to prove seabed mining is ecologically sound. "There are too many unknowns for this industry to go ahead," said Natalie Lowrey of the Australia-based Deep Sea Mining Campaign, which is calling for the practice to be banned. "We've already desecrated a lot of our lands. We don't need to be doing that in the deep sea."