A NEW gold rush is
on, but the miners aren't clawing at the earth
with dynamite, picks and shovels -- they're
trolling the ocean floor with submarines and
remote-controlled cameras.
Prospectors and scientists hope to strike it
rich by dragging up gold, silver and other
minerals from the seabed off Papua New Guinea,
mining formations with names like ``Satanic
mills,'' ``Roman ruins'' and ``Snowcap.''
If they do, they will have beat the odds that
defeated previous miners who expected to get
rich off deep-sea manganese nodules in the
1970s, or to exploit Antarctica for oil and
minerals until a mining ban was adopted there.
They also are facing environmental and
scientific objections that mining could despoil
unique geological wonders that have led to
bizarre evolutionary adaptations of deep-sea
animals like blind shrimp and giant tube worms.
But the sites proposed for mining are all
within Papua New Guinea's territorial waters,
exempting them from any international controls.
Nautilus Minerals Corp., registered in Papua New Guinea and run by Australians, hopes to
reap billions of dollars by mining ``black
smokers'' -- underwater volcanic vents that
belch out superheated clouds of mineral-laden
fluid.
When the minerals hit the cold sea water, they
coalesce into gold, silver, copper, lead and
other metals.
The black smokers form a hellish underwater
landscape. Scientists using submarines and
robot cameras have dubbed one active field of
smokers the ``Satanic mills.'' Another group of
ragged columns thrusting from the seabed is
known as the ``Roman ruins.'' ``Snowcap'' is a
hill crowned with white bacteria digesting rich
nutrients spewing from the smokers.
Australia's federal science agency, the
Commonwealth Scientific Industrial Research
Organization, helped find the metal deposits in
the waters off Papua New Guinea's northern
coast, working with researchers from the United
States, Canada, Germany, Japan and Papua New
Guinea.
They were initially studying how rich
landlocked ore deposits like those at Broken
Hill and Mount Isa in Australia originally
formed eons ago when those sites were under the
sea.
``The deposits are exceptionally rich in copper
and gold,'' said Ray Binns, an official with
the Australian science agency.
Samples brought up from one deposit averaged a
very rich 10 percent copper and 26 percent zinc
and had 15 grams of gold and 200 grams of
silver per metric ton, he said. Another deposit
yielded 15 percent copper and 3 percent zinc and 21 grams of gold and 130 grams of silver.
``If you found this deposit on dry land, you'd
call these bonanza figures. They could change
the economics of sea-floor mining and cause it
to be taken seriously,'' Binns said.
The chief executive of Nautilus, Julian Malnic,
said the gold and other mineral deposits found
3,900 to 5,600 feet deep in the Manus Basin of
the Bismarck Sea had excited him since the
first samples were brought up in 1993.
``They were utterly compelling. And the fact we
now have title to the deposits has galvanized
the scientists and mining industry into seeing
he possibilities,'' Malnic said.
Nautilus received mining licenses on Nov. 28
for two tracts covering more than 1,930 square
miles of Papua New Guinea's seabed. The company
now must raise investment capital and figure
out how to recover the minerals.
Some experts see the mining industry going the
way of the oil industry, which began on land
but is now increasingly tapping undersea
deposits.
``Fields like this make the prospect of
undersea mining look economic,'' Binns said.
``It is already technically feasible and, in
one sense, it is cheaper than mining on land
because you don't need fixed infrastructure as
you do on a terrestrial mine. Hauling the ore
from the depths of the sea is no harder in
theory than hauling it up from deep
underground.''
South African companies have pulled up diamonds
from shallow offshore waters, mining areas
where rivers carried the gems down into the
sea.
In the 1970s, industrial nations wrangled with
poor countries over mining rights in
international waters to deep-sea manganese
nodules, which also contain cobalt and nickel.
Debate on a ``Law of the Sea'' treaty dragged
on long after mining companies shelved the idea
of deep-sea nodule mining as unprofitable.
Nautilus and Australia's science agency say the
deposits they are prospecting are in much
shallower, more accessible waters than the
ocean-bottom manganese nodules.
Alfred Simpson, director of the
Fiji-headquartered South Pacific Applied
Geoscience Commission, noted Nautilus is
connected with the developers of the huge Lihir
gold mine in Papua New Guinea, ``So they are
not cranks.''
But he said he didn't think the company would
start mining in the next year or two. ``I
wouldn't be rushing out to buy shares,'' he
said.
What concerns Simpson's commission and other
research agencies is that the ``black smokers''
are host to exotic species often previously
unknown to science.
``These could be of greater significance and
value than the mineral aspects. What we are
worried about is mining companies getting in
before we have thoroughly researched these
areas. We could lose a lot of information if we
go into mining too quickly,'' Simpson said.
He said more smokers had been detected in the
North Fiji Basin and between Fiji and Tonga, although at far greater depths.
He also said onshore locations of manganese,
copper, nickel, gold and cobalt at Boise Bay,
Canada, should be sufficient to cheaply supply
world demand for many years. But Japan, China,
South Korea and India are investing heavily in
research and technology to locate and recover
nodules from the beds of the Indian and Pacific
oceans, he added.
``One has to ask why, and the answer has to be
for strategic reasons. They feel they have no
guaranteed access to shore deposits of such
strategic minerals,'' Simpson said. ``That is
why they are spending big money. Are they
crazy? Their motive has little to do with
cost.''
