Climate Change Editor
seignoie.mohammed@guardian.co.tt
As Trinidad and Tobago undertakes its first locally led deep-sea scientific expedition, a larger question emerges: Why are governments discussing deep-sea mining in ecosystems scientists have barely begun to understand?
Before a remotely operated vehicle disappears beneath the waves around T&T, there is a fundamental problem scientists must confront: much of the world it is entering has never been scientifically observed.
The research vessel Falkor (too) is spending nearly a month exploring T&T’s waters and adjacent high seas as part of the Deep Wonders of T&T expedition, led primarily by Trinbagonian scientists.
The scale of the unknown is striking. Ninety-three per cent of T&T’s marine jurisdiction lies below recreational scuba depths, according to the Schmidt Ocean Institute, leaving some of the country’s largest ecosystems beyond ordinary human reach.
“There is so much left to discover,” says Dr Diva Amon, the expedition’s chief scientist.
While researchers aboard the vessel are trying to establish what lives in the deep, governments meeting elsewhere in the Caribbean are negotiating rules that could eventually govern an entirely new extractive industry: commercial mining of the international seabed.
In Kingston, Jamaica, the Council of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) is meeting this month to continue negotiations over regulations for exploiting mineral resources in “the Area,” the seabed beyond national jurisdiction.
The coincidence is difficult to ignore. Scientists are descending into our deep ocean to establish what is there. At almost the same time, international negotiators are debating the rules under which parts of the deep seabed elsewhere could eventually be mined.
The expedition is not an environmental baseline study for an ISA mining site, but it exposes a larger problem confronting deep-sea governance: how much should humanity be willing to disturb before it adequately understands what is there.
For many environmental decisions on land and in coastal waters, governments require baseline studies before development begins. Scientists and conservation groups argue that similar questions should apply to the deep ocean.
The Caribbean’s
largest blind spot
For most Trinbagonians, the sea is familiar. It is the beaches visited on holidays, Tobago’s coral reefs, fishing grounds that sustain coastal communities and the Gulf of Paria crossed daily by inter-island ferries.
But beneath the surface lies an entirely different world.
Because most people will never descend thousands of metres beneath the sea, the deep ocean is often imagined as a lifeless wasteland.
“The biggest misconception,” Amon says, “is that it is empty ... that could not be further from the truth.”
Instead, she describes an ecosystem that regulates climate, supports fisheries and contains hundreds of thousands of species globally. Every expedition continues to uncover species previously unknown to science.
For scientists aboard the Falkor (too), the reason for exploring the Caribbean’s deep sea is therefore not exploration for its own sake. It is leading efforts to understand their own waters, building the evidence needed for future policy decisions.
“We are exploring so that we can better steward,” Amon says. “By gathering the scientific data ... we can then use that to inform the decisions that we are making about how we use these parts of the planet.”
It is an admission that one of the nation’s largest ecosystems remains virtually unmapped.
Decisions racing ahead of discovery
The uncertainty becomes clearer when mining the deep ocean enters the picture.
Deep-sea mining proposes extracting mineral deposits from the ocean floor, including polymetallic nodules, cobalt-rich crusts and massive sulphides rich in nickel, cobalt, copper and manganese.
Research published in 2021 by ocean-governance researcher Pradeep Singh, in the Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, noted that these metals are used in batteries, electric vehicles and clean-energy technologies.
The author also pointed to arguments from mining supporters that demand for these minerals will grow dramatically as countries move away from fossil fuels.
But the environmental counterargument is something more basic. We still do not adequately understand many of the ecosystems that could be affected.
A 2018 scientific review in Frontiers in Marine Science repeatedly reaches the same conclusion: enormous knowledge gaps remain about the deep sea. Many species have yet to be discovered, making meaningful environmental baseline studies extraordinarily difficult.
In other words, scientists are still trying to answer the most basic questions about what exists before policymakers begin asking what can be extracted.
Discover first. Understand second. Decide third.
For Dr La Daana Kanhai of The University of the West Indies, the expedition represents the beginning of that process.
“First of all, documenting what’s there,” she says. “We’re also hoping to understand how we as humans are impacting the deep sea.”
Only then comes another question.
“If we had to designate protected areas, where do we designate those areas? That would be based on the science that we collect from this expedition.”
The sequence is deliberate.
Discover first. Understand second. Decide third.
It is the same approach governments demand for projects on land through environmental impact assessments and baseline ecological surveys. Yet much of the international conversation around deep-sea mining is unfolding before many of those baselines exist.
For small island states, this is not an abstract debate.
The Caribbean depends on healthy oceans more than most regions of the world.
Kanhai explains that deep-sea ecosystems help regulate climate by storing carbon, recycling nutrients that sustain marine food webs and ultimately supporting fisheries that feed coastal communities.
“Our global interconnected ocean is really very important in providing us with key services,” she says. “If we impact our ocean negatively, then we lose some of those very important services.”
She cautioned that many of those ecosystem services remain poorly understood, particularly in the deep ocean. That uncertainty complicates efforts to predict how industrial-scale mining might affect biodiversity or ecological processes that unfold over centuries.
The Caribbean at the centre of the debate
The centre of this global debate is not Washington or Beijing. It is Kingston.
The International Seabed Authority (ISA) is an autonomous international organisation established under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) to regulate mineral-related activities in the international seabed Area beyond national jurisdiction.
Commercial exploitation has not yet begun under the ISA framework. The rules are still unfinished.
At its 31st session this month, the ISA Council is continuing work on draft exploitation regulations. Its July agenda includes unresolved questions concerning environmental requirements, inspections, compliance and other elements of the regulatory system.
The ISA itself describes completion of the Mining Code as a prerequisite for future commercial activities in the Area.
That leaves Caribbean governments in an unusual position. They are not merely observers of a distant environmental controversy. The institution responsible for the international seabed is headquartered in the region; Caribbean states, like T&T, participate in its negotiations, and decisions taken there concern an ocean system on which island states depend.
But ask a fisherman about deep-sea mining, and another ocean crisis comes first on T&T’s coastline.
For fisherfolk and marine-sector representatives consulted in reporting for this story, deep-sea mining is not the marine issue keeping them awake at night.
Immediate problems such as declining catches, competition for fishing grounds and destructive fishing practices can feel far more urgent than machines that may one day operate kilometres beneath international waters.
Yet, the rules being written now could shape an industry for decades.
Looking into the darkness
When Falkor (too)’s remotely operated vehicle slips beneath the surface during the expedition, every metre downward will carry scientists into territory few people have ever witnessed.
Some discoveries may be spectacular, such as a pretty purple octopus. Others may appear insignificant, like a sponge, a worm, a patch of black coral. But each observation fills a gap in a map that has remained largely blank.
For Caribbean nations confronting climate change, biodiversity loss and growing pressure to develop new marine resources, those gaps matter.
Because evidence-based decisions require evidence.
And the Caribbean is only now beginning to collect it.
The expedition may reveal extraordinary new species or hidden ecosystems. Its greatest contribution, however, may be far simpler.
It reminds us that the debate over deep-sea mining is not just about minerals beneath the seabed. It is about whether societies are prepared to make irreversible decisions about a world that remains largely unexplored.
If we would never approve a major development project without first establishing an environmental baseline, one final question remains.
Why should mining the deep ocean be any different?
This story was produced as part of the Caribbean Deep Sea Mining Media Fellowship, an initiative by Climate Tracker Caribbean in collaboration with the Jamaica Environment Trust (JET), RISE UP for the Ocean, and EcoVybz Environmental Creatives.
