The Truth about Deep Sea Mining 

not gonna lie? i am AMAZED that Subnautica actually depicted those nodules on the sea floor 'realistically'

Just so you’re aware, ctenophores, or comb jellies (seen at 1:47) actually are not bioluminescent- at least not in the way most people assume. In fact what you are seeing is almost always just light refracting off of their characteristic 8 rows of cillia, producing the well known rainbow effect. Many ctenophore species are indeed capable of true bioluminescence, but it can only be noticed in very dark conditions and is very rarely observed by those not looking for it. They’re also not true jellies, but I digress.

I like how you’ve done your sources. Numbered and then direct links listed

We have routinely failed to anticipate the far reaching consequences of our actions in the past. Now many are prepared to ignore more consequences to fix the problems they themselves caused. The creatures of the deep will not be the only casualties of these operations, and no doubt our meddling with an ecosystem we don't fully understand will only lead to even greater threats to the health of our planet in the future.

I used to have salt water fish tanks and a lot of these minerals were critical to coral development. If we harvest them out of the ocean at a massive scale, we might upset the overall mineral balance of the ocean.

Honestly... seeing all this and understanding the forces and scales involved, along with the advances to access in the recent years, it seems almost easier to mine asteroids.

1. Pump compressed air into the pipe is one way, but requires massive power from big compressors - but the technology/manifolds are there. 2. Lifting pump is a good option and perhaps you can place several lifting pumps in certain depths while you are lowering your riser to sustain a constant-ish flowrate (or discharge rate of material on the surface), I do worry about the durability of the rotor and other moving/rotational parts in the pump What I recommend is take the existing mud pumps from the Oil & Gas Industry, pump water based mud down your ROV (customise it in such a way that you will have a giant hopper working underbalanced) and then lift it up to the surface. Then use shakers and crushers (like the ones used to crush coal in a coal fired power plant) and then separate your little "nuggets" either by gravity or centrifugal separators (so as to use the existing rotational equipment/power and compressed air used on board). Be prepared to have A LOT of spare Flanges !!

Excellent video giving a sense of the nuance in this challenging conundrum. Thank you!

Honestly, you did a nice job talking about this subject. Ore mining in the sea with oil based technology, to power electric cars .. We all know it's a debate that mankind has to face. You explained how it would impact the environment (on land and sea) but also how it impacts countries where the rush on battery tech is quietly killing thousands. A conundrum, but a well explained one.

As with everything, more research has to be done. Man if only everyone understood how important scientific research is.

Beautiful production! Thank you for bringing this to us!

Man this is such a hard dilemma. "Is potentially destroying an unknown ecological system worth it to save the ones we know, for a fact, are in decline.?" There's also the fact that everything on the food chain is connected, you destroy an ecosystem and the downstream (upstream?) consequences could be catastrophic. Especially because it is unknown, it could be a lot more connected than we realize. I like the fact it could reduce emissions, but my gut feeling (which obviously wouldn't really hold any weight) says to leave the oceans alone as much as possible.

As a mining engineer I can testify no one is going to take on a project like this. There are too many risks and the logistics for ore will be nightmare. There are still a lot more resources on surface of the earth that are predictable and profitable.

Correction: The toxic tailings at metal mines are also a product of exposure of metal sulfides and sulfur to air, forming sulfuric acid and metal oxides, not necessarily from processing. You can have naturally occurring 'acid mine drainages' from erosion of metal ore bodies- whence the Rio Tinto. There are no such sulfides in these highly oxidized open ocean marine sediments and not much sulfide in the nodules themselves.

I suppose a skip car design like in blast furnaces might be a great method to lift these things. The weight of the bucket cancels out. You spend energy solely to lift the material and a bit to fight friction. One team underwater can collect material into a bucket and hook/unhook full and empty buckets when they get down. They just need to clear the area to not get crushed from above by a falling bucket Edit: and maybe the buckets themself can be used to transport compacted sludge back down

Great research and delivery, great stuff!

The lengths humanity is willing to go to avoid building an electric train network are astonishing. Obviously like the video discusses, there are environmental tradeoffs everywhere and there isn't a single simple answer, but I'm definitely confused by the framing of this issue primarily around EV batteries when there are other green transit and energy alternatives that don't require precious metal extraction at unprecedented levels.

I don't want to sound like a luddite so I will say yes, batteries are SO important for a greener future. But there is also merit in reduction of consumption too: we need electric cars AND less use of cars, with more efficient forms of transportation being the substitute. I know this is an engineering channel so talk about public policy that doesn't involve engineering wouldn't be as relevant, but I just wanted to include the thought. Also, this way, the dilemmas about interrupting ecosystems won't be as pressing.

there is also a massive belt of deep sea nodules just south of NZ. starting at around 85 degrees south. basically starting at north east island and extending to auckland island. and the fact there has been considerable mantle uplift in that region, i'd bet you can find shallow water nodules in that area.

Wouldnt an archimedes screw be a much more elegant solution to the trasportation issue?

The effects of land mining are well-known and can be managed. We know practically nothing about this ecosystem in comparison. Mining on the seafloor is a disaster waiting to happen and should not be condoned.

Your explanation of how the minerals condense around a catalyst as an interaction between the sea above and the floor below was sublime.

I love watching Real Engineering... he makes such complex topics seem so simple !!!!

This is the best video I've seen on this topic, and I've watched quite a few. Thank you.

At our Canadian mining company's (then INCO... now VALE), R&D lab, we had a small collection of sea nodules that we were analyzing for potential mineral yields. This was in the 1990's and I remember hearing from a couple of our technicians that they had great potential for extraction of high percentages of what we were primarily interested in... that is nickel, copper, cobalt, as well as PMs.

I can't even begin to imagine the damage this will do to the ecology down there

In the Southern Pacific area is a large field of floating plastic debris that could gathered and turned into a substitute to swap for the current sea bottom coverage.

Awesome video, and also, awesome idea for late game RTS games haha

Your production value just leveled up. I see the effort that was put into this video. Good work on the general graphics, overlays, motion graphics and collection of footages and data.

There's so much uncertainty about how this would affect nutrient cycles, even with "proper" disposal of the sludge. Stirring up all this sediment could mean an increased upwelling of nutrients, causing harmful algal blooms or hypoxic waters. We should probably try to stay away from this...

Thankyou for making this available.

It's my understanding that the brine from desalination of ocean water, which will likely become more and more common and important, contains all of the aforementioned elements and could provide all we could ever use. I'd also like to point out, that there is evidence that these nodules can grow much more rapidly than previously believed. There have been nodules found that grew on metal cans, parts of ship wrecks etc. There has been next to no study into how they're formed. And since it is a chemical process, I wonder if it would be possible to artificially grow these nodules out of seawater since there are minute amounts in sea water.

12:30 It says Magnesium in the chart, not Manganese like in the audio. Those two elements are quite different.

The major problem with the whole "we could make x number electric cars" idea is that electric cars are more a distraction than a solution. When you are talking North America, EU, Japan, and China, the heart of the problem is shitty infrastructure and poor structural design. In other words, renewable energy sources are better, but electric cars are like a band-aid on a severed artery; it is better than nothing, but it won't save anything. We need to work towards a car-less, high-efficiency society. At this point, anything other than that is a waste of time and resources. It is probably outside my lifetime before we will face societal collapse and mass die-off, but the fact that those things are likely under our current path should be worrying enough.

Any chance that slurry we are pumping can be used as a fertilizer on land, instead of pumped back down? I’m curious of the mineral and organic makeup of that soil.

love what you do and the beauty that you bring me in these videos

The animation of the mining makes me think only about Dune 😅

Could one option be to embrace the antropocene and recreate the seafloor ecosystem as we harvest it? Sunken ships become seeds for reefs and aboriginal slash and burn practices in the Amazon have created some of the lushest jungle regions. Could we produce synthetic nodules that fulfill the same biological purpose so we can have the valuable material while leaving behind an ecosystem recreated with cheaper material? Could be worth study.

Real Engineering, I'm a huge fan of your videos. As a medical school student I love learning about the future of engineering and physics. I'm very interested in modernizing my home and if I can invest enough to start an engineering based business. I think it just goes along with understanding the world and learning as much as we can. Medicine is now interacting with engineering more than ever. While you can't fix everything with engineering, especially molecularly speaking, I believe medicine is now a hyper focused version of engineering. It's engineering hyperfocused on taking advantage of the preexisting complexity of preexisting life. Sure, at lower levels biology is just learning about life. However, my medical school classes are surprisingly similar to engineering classes, and we learn a lot about biological engineering. I'm disappointed with my undergrad science degree, because they should be teaching the level and/or specificity of my medical school to some extent. If you ever have any in person meet ups I would love to just discuss things with you. We could even zoom, and you could meet my classmates as well if you'd like to know more about engineering in medicine. It's held back by old school dichotomy that engineering and medicine are two different things. I also would like you to make a video on water witches. I want to know if there's any reasonable explanation for it, as many professionals in the trades claim it works. Here is a short video from a very reputable plumbing expert on RU-vid who never lies or Exaggerates: ru-vid.comYFE8ahwZ5oI?feature=share . Please try to clear this up. Lots of people want to learn more about it and I really believe your video could be a big deal. I can't find anything on the topic that's on your level of trustable. Keep it up!

I am curious about the study of returning the sediment that is brought to the surface with the nodules. There is certainly the aspect of shading out sunlight from lower levels but mid ocean areas appear blue because there is so little algae and plankton due to low levels of nutrients in the water at levels that receive sunlight. If nutrients from the sea bed were distributed at the surface, would the nutrients not promote blooms of algae and plankton? The increased growth at the surface would increase the "snow" falling to the lower depths increasing available food there. All of the increased biological growth would be consuming carbon and possibly having a measurable effect on reducing ocean acidification.

Very fascinating stuff. I cam across metal nodules growing in water in a game and thought it was weird, but there's actually a real life biases for it.

Real Science: *Makes a video about how important is to preserve deep sea biosphere in the Arctic* Real Engineering: "This is how cool engineering will ruin deep sea very slowly" We deserve Cthulhu and Leviathan to wake up together and deal with them.

Another question is whether or not they could seed these nodules and grow them in "farms" in the ocean. And whether or not they could speed the layerying/depositing up. And with the issue of decreased or zero biodiversity in the mined areas on the sea floor would it be possible to seed artificial reefs in the mined areas after nodule extraction to ensure that the flaura and fauna species have habit again

Genuinely great and informative video!

I find the 'kill ecosystem we don't know or kill the ecosystem we do' dichotomy at the end there overly simplistic. The lack of consideration of other options like cutting down car use altogether, seeing what technologies can make do without batteries, or even just finding less harmful battery designs, seems representative of this endemic of trying to find solutions that just maintain the status quo rather than actually changing our societal lifestyle and order. I find this subject really interesting, but that framing at the end really just leaves me with the impression that this is just another avenue for screwing ourselves over in the long term.

These videos are so well made! Thank you for all the work and information!

It sounds like the Clarion-Clipperton Zone could possibly be the North American version of the Spratly Islands.

why not use a vertical conveyor belt for the rigid part of the rigid riser the "platform" of the belt cud also be grated allowing things to peel of as they reach the surface, the rover probably have the most impact but i don't have a good idea on how to reduce it's impact.

This whole video is based around the idea that massively increased battery production is necessary for a greener future, but is that actually true? We can work to minimize the battery use without sacrifice on cutting fossil fuels. Gravity or heat based energy storage systems can be used to store wind or solar electricity and an electric train system could run on overhead wires rather than needing the batteries that an electric car would.f

I would love to see a video about underground vs surface vs deep sea mining methods. from what I can tell, easily accessible surface deposits are getting rarer, so we will have to mine deeper underground. Also the environmental impact of an open pit mine vs an underground mine would be interesting. There is also in situ mining which pumps a chemical slurry through a deposit to extract minerals

I wonder if they considered use some crab cage like deposit boxes. A crane suspended, propeller stabilized vehicle can drop the cages onto the collector. The collector can then eject the cages onto the floor when full, for the crane vehicle to eventually pick them up. Also this way most of the slurry will be released closer to the sea floor.

Why not have a tube lined w/ moving conveyor belt by a rope machine that the conveyor belt is pressed into a tube and its a flexible tube, so the conveyor belt can be engineered where the belt is always trying to stay at a certain circumference so when the rocks go up the tube w/ a little wider opening, the belt can basically grab onto the chunks of mineral & theoretically not scoop up the debris since it’s too small

AMAZING, that one can make an entire 14m video about mining manganese nodules from the ocean floor, and not even mention the interesting history of the Hughes Glomar Explorer, which was a deep-sea drillship platform built for Project Azorian, the secret 1974 effort by the United States CIA to recover the Soviet submarine K-129, with the infamous cover story that the ship was mining manganese nodules from the ocean floor.

the biggest challenge in deep sea mining is that humans still know too little about the ocean overall.

We should be mining bentonite deposits, great new deposits discovered, and Scaling up a ship or two ...I can think of retrofitting an old icebreaker, or cruiser.... And a few modified oil tankers to move product to either southern cali, or Gulf coast

Very informative, occurred to me what about using magnets to attract the medals without raking across the surface and floating the materials to the surface so the sludge isn't created? Would need to understand how this would impact life but theory wise seems perhaps better that scrapping and pumping?

I've got something to add that I really think needs to be stated explicitly: As you can see in the video, a great deal of Cobalt we extract on land is mined *using child labor.*

Never have I ever seen such a holistic approach to a topic. Thank you SO much for this!!!

Should update the video with regard to The Metals Company project in CCZ using that exact rover and an old oil drilling tanker.

I would suggest to use magnets to attract the nodules, since they are mostly Fe/Iron. And use an tubular electric coil to bring them to the surface.

What about artificial habitat restoration--replacing these anchor points? Less useful, harmless materials could be distributed after mining (ideally being dirt cheap and trivial to transport thanks to ship efficiency). The 11:12 1989 coast of Peru experiment could be reused to test restoration of an area mined decades ago. Meanwhile, a new experiment could replicate those seabed disturbances in a similar ecosystem, but restore the area immediately after mining. Undoubtedly, this mining would still damage the ecosystem, but the known marine populations may recover much quicker. If these experiments prove promising, a third experiment could be conducted using a new mining pattern: destroying strips of the ecosystem before restoring them, as opposed to vast, unbroken swaths of the seafloor (which the 1989 experiment's "two nautical miles in diameter" collection sounded like). The idea here is to distribute the areas in need of repopulation between local, surviving marine life. This is to further reduce the time necessary to repopulate, leaving mature organisms as close as possible to these areas.

Just because we can do something doesn't necessarily mean that we should do it ! We are so obsessed on how to do it instead of asking ourselves 'should we do it' .

1. What about potential value of nodule's nucleuses for paleontology? Can we actually use it as plain resource? 2. Why don't replace nodules with hard plastics, so that we can both utilize it, and give seabed animals a places to attach thamselves?

Good Job. What is the lovely cello background music? - credits please :-)

Thank you for the level-headed, informative video. Are there deep-sea mining solutions that aren't track-based and are less impactful on the local ecosystem?

We found a way to make renewable energy non-renewable

Amazing video, thanks so much for sharing!

Lifting the modules to the surface is done with an airlift system. Used also in construction for deep piling. Following this closely as I am a (very small) shareholder in TMC.

I quite like the sea as being a relatively untouched area. As much as I want humans to progress, I feel the sea should be a unique place that we try to stay away from. The video of how shipping vessels affect whale movement comes to mind when ever I see anything about sea mining.

As I watched, having previously never hard of ANY of this, my stress level rose as I pondered the environmental effects and impact on ecosystems. I then appreciate that as this documentary went-on, those impacts are taken into account and discussed at length. However, if history has proven anything over and over, virtually without exception, if there's money to be made, they'll shamelessly exploit those resources in the most cost-effective way possible (IE to hell with the environment, to hell with the future). Oh, and one nitpicking detail: at 2:47, you say "only four crewed missions have been to the bottom of the marina trench". A marina is where people keep their boats. The Mariannas are a chain of thee main islands (Guam, Tinnian and Saipan) that give their neighboring trench its name. Omitting that one syllable makes quite a difference in the meaning got the word.

The oceans constantly change. For example, the rivers that run into the ocean, change in quantities from year to year. The Arctic and Antarctic add salt as the sea ice melts. Evaporation has a big effect and all of the volcanoes, like Kilauea and Loihi add many tons of minerals at extreme temperatures. There is no mineral balance, the aquatic life either adapts, moves or dies.

I wonder if it'd be worth replacing the nodules with gravel, and what the different would be compared to just scouring the bottom.

(From a non-expert person) I just hope those companies were to spend the required money to do the research and be able to do the least damage to environments with a sustainable strategy for the native species rather than quick and expensive-to-cheap extraction. Great explanation, and also I'm amazed by some of the comments! Very informative.

This maybe a little simplistic and I am unsure of any potential issues but maybe they could insert similar sized rocks leftover from terrestrial mining with the return slurry and just let it fall back to the seafloor. You may be that would work as a replacement for the nodules?

9:25:"...at the very least we need...": If they can do a "riser", why don't they also do a "faller". Connect the riser to the faller at the processor on the surface. Leave riser and faller open at the sea floor. The potential energy in the riser is essentially balanced with that of the faller. Thus, all you need to do is provide energy equaling the potential energy you remove from the process...plus a minor amount of kinetic energy to move the material at no potential energy delta...i.e. to overcome drag.

There is another option for mining the oceans, pulling lithium directly from the sea water. Its fairly low concentration and if I remember correctly, we wouldn't be able to really pull enough out in a meaningful time to effect life. But we could pull enough out to make batteries at scale. But it has a similar technology issue.

Would you be able to add a second line going down for the sediment, even using the downward force to help bring material up? Then essentially just dispersing the sediment back at the lower floor in a spray equivalent to the traversed area of the miner. Basically a robot vaccum cleaner that expels out the dust we want to leave there. Additionally since we are down there anyways could we use it as a secondary means to long term bury certain materials that either are detrimental to us, or beneficial to the environment. Things coming to mind would be dispersing black carbon

Out of curiosity would it be possible to design ballast containers that get loaded up with materials then sent to the surface passively to be collected via crane? The main issues I can see with this is designing them to survive that much pressure and preventing them from drifting out of range of the flotilla.

I say Asteroid mining should be the main priority.

Really crazy idea here: How about we build walkable cities with some sweet public transport instead of upgrading inefficient, directly CO2-emitting, way-too-much-space-taking individual vehicles into inefficient, indirectly CO2-emitting, way-too-much-space-taking individual vehicles? So we wouldn't have to mine that much stuff in general?

I feel like we need to look for less resource-intensive solutions like storage with more available materials (something you have made a video about), reducing car traffic in general through better public transit and city planning, and so on. It seems that lithium batteries are so popular only because they have been around so long and therefore have market dominance

Looks cool but the easiest solution to the dilemma at the end would be to simply use less metals. Instead of replacing all our ICE cars to electric, just have fewer cars.

Would it be possible to seed the field with volcanic rocks once the nodules collected to give an habitat for local species ? sort of like an artificial reef ?

It should be noted that these nodules might be possibly biogenically assisted in origin as their are chemosynthetic bacteria which use many of these metals for metabolism and might contribute to productivity. Now a real question not talked about is that production is the main component driving destructive mining practices so regulations and restrictions on what can or can't be done here are important to have a significant effect on improving environmental and ethical conditions.

The sponsored segments at the end always feel like the conclusion statement. Like the point of the entire video is to get you to sign up for Brilliant, and you just happen to learn about deep sea mining along the way.

This is something we really shouldn't be doing. We've demonstrated continuously throughout history, but especially in recent times, that we understand nothing about the effects our actions will have on the biosphere until many years after it's too late to go back. Furthermore, it's likely we soon won't even need these rare metals for batteries. Aluminum-Sulfur and Aluminum-Ion batteries don't use them, and look like ideal technologies to replace Lithium-Ion in the near future. Failing that, asteroid mining will be orders of magnitude more efficient and less ecologically destructive; the moment that becomes viable, the idea of mining metals from the dirt will seem absurd.

Hello. Just wanted to let you know at 12:29 about you are talking about manganese but your infographic has magnesium labelled.

What we need is studies and methods of harvesting those things precisely picked by some robot and not sucked in. That way, we could control how much we harvest in a certain area and only take a few percentage not all in one area. And then look into mining asteroids.

Another alternative is to accept that constructing millions of EVs might not be viable and to pursue more efficient public transportation and city design.

I vaguely remember a Carl Barks or Don Rosa Donald Duck cartoon where Scrooge, Donald, Huey, Dewey and Louie tried a similar thing. It was something about filtering out gold from ocean water using some sort of giant carpet tugged behind a boat.

One could well find that the released sediment plumes may promote algal growth by supplying iron for increased carbon sequestration.

equip the collecter rovers with compressed air, enough to fill ballast balloons,enough to float them to surface when they are fully loaded. Gold dredgers float huge boulders using these methods,it just needs to be scaled up to fit the application.

I think using the dirty sludge that were left with could be used to help pull the good ore up. Using it like a lever it would assist are raising it, and once it’s at the bottom, it can then release the sludge on the bottom of the seabed; where it came from. Along with that, what if we are to construct solid object that we send down with these sludge loads. This would return solid objects for life to cling to. They’re not using the metals, they’re using the physical form of solid structures. I feel this could help a lot; while not perfect, it may just be worth a shot.

Speaking as a mining engineer, you would think I'd be all for this. But I would rather see us focus our energies on asteroid capture and mining. It minimises the impact on our ecosystems, and the pursuit of this goal is further incentive to make us interplanetary and reach for the stars. Like it or not, Mining is an essential part of the world as we know it.. And enables me (same as you) to sit on my couch and watch this fascinating video on my mobile phone. But we can always strive to be better and lessen our impact.

Endlich mal ein Beitrag, der versucht viele Gesichtspunkte eines Problems zu beleuchten und nicht voreingenommen herangeht!

I’m curious whether an electro magnet like at the recycling center can pick up the nodules?

I mean at the level of complexity this requires, I can't help but feel that asteroid mining/collecting might be a better alternative. As much as rockets emit pollutants, is the environmental damage more or less than this and/or current technology? Also, we could certainly implement a clever system to reduce emissions and lower costs with something like asteroid mining.

I'd want a couple extra decades of environmental impact studies before any entity is allowed to pursue deep sea mining. At some point sooner than later, we need to stop digging up new materials and reuse what we got!

This looks less like 'the best way' and more like 'the first thing we thought of'. We run trucks alongside combine harvesters, for example, rather than try to connect them to a central farm via a hose. The plume of silt is presumably linked to the speed of extraction. So have the machine move slower, and wash more silt off the nodules at depth. Maybe also use something other than tank tracks too.

You are a very good videographer.👌🏻❤