Avenue for exploration

Deep sea mining - with potential to unlock critical minerals for clean energy and technological advancements - holds immense promise as a solution to depleting terrestrial resources

- SHREYA GOYAL

Oceans are a common heritage of mankind. At a significant depth of oceans, seabed contain rich minerals like manganese, cobalt, nickel, zinc and rare earth materials. The process of deep sea mining has led to discussions and debates in the international community due to its potential to meet the demands of minerals and metals, considering the fact that the terrestrial resources are depleting at a fast rate. Ocean explorations and deep sea mining have revealed the presence of polymetallic nodules, sulphides, gas etc. that can help in building a strong clean energy infrastructure. This in turn has the potential to raise the global demands of minerals by a large percentage as the world is slowly shifting towards harnessing renewable sources of energy. Deep sea includes both genetic and non-genetic (mineral) resources. Deep sea are thermocline areas where the sunshine does not penetrate the water surface. As a result, the temperatures are quite low while the pressure remains too high. This makes technological engineering in such harsh weather a big task. Limited visibility and access create difficulties in establishing a clear sea line of communication. Acidification from the vehicles can cause genetic alteration of marine organisms and introduce toxins in the marine food chain. However, despite these inequities, deep sea explorations, better data access, efficient collection technique of minerals and metals, ocean climate analysis, enable training opportunities and much more. Exploration and exploitation of the minerals in the deep sea not only comply with sustainable development goals (SDGs) because of zero-carbon content but also help in building generation techniques required to boost scientific discoveries, economic oppor