standardization of environmental data and information - International ...

PRESENTATION ON PRIORITIES FOR IMPACT ANALYSIS OF DEEP-
SEABED MINING
Dr. Morgan began his presentation by stating that he worked not as a
scientist but as an environmental impact specialist. Environmental impact
analysis was like engineering in that it employed science, but it was
certainly not science.
Exploration of the deep seabed had been under way since the mid-
1960s and was taking place now. Mining-system tests had just begun in
the late 1970s and early 1980s but were not taking place now. To his
knowledge, not one of the active contractors had scheduled such a test; not
one was listed specifically in any of the 15-year plans of work and there
certainly would be none in the next 5 years. Moreover, little was known
about commercial mining of the deep seabed. Several speculative
mechanisms for doing the work had been discussed. Yet, only meagre
ideas had been advanced about how the crucial bottom interaction would
take place: what, if any, mobility the mining vehicle would have, how fast it
would move, how it would interface with the ocean surface, what would be
done with the discharge materials collected at the mining ship. None of this
was known and anyone who said otherwise had kept the secret well over
the years.
As exploration was an active endeavour, there was a real need to for
guidance on environmental standards so as to optimise exploration time
and take advantage of the significant amounts of information already
collected, in order to generate the most useful picture of the environment
obtainable from the vast array of data collected since the mid-1960s. The
changes in oceanographic techniques over that 35-year period had
increased the difficulty of putting the information together into a coherent
database – one of the most important approaches to optimising the data
related to ocean mining.
A fundamental fact to bear in mind was that it was not known where
mining would take place. One of the key duties of an environmental impact
analyst was to extract specific information from engineers, planners and
lawyers so that the analysis could be done. However, such information
could not be extracted in this case because it was not available. Even if
everything on the list of monitoring guidelines was done at a selected site,
the fact that commercial mining would take place in a few square
kilometres within an exploration area covering hundreds of thousands of
INTERNATIONAL SEABED AUTHORITY 136