The Future Maritime Operating Environment and the Role of Naval Power

2.2 Undersea Communications and Minerals
While we do not have any precise knowledge of the mineral wealth that lies in the seabed,
technology is making us better informed. In the past, extraction of most minerals that had been
identified was either impossible or uneconomical. As a result of technological advances, however,
that situation is changing. Even if the costs are still prohibitively high today, they are unlikely to
remain so forever. Environmental concerns will continue to make exploitation of deep oceanic
mineral resources controversial, but their market value could make development increasingly
attractive. Already, extraction of some of these resources has grown exponentially. This is
especially evident in the field of energy, and oil and gas production is the world’s biggest marine
industry, worth more than US$300 billion annually. 35 Outside of North American waters, the
number of deep water oil wells has increased four-fold since 2000. Current forecasts indicate that
by 2035, up to 11 percent of global production could come from deep-sea drilling. 36 There is also
an expectation that the minerals industry is set to expand into the ocean depths. 37 Large deposits
of minerals, such as gold, silver, zinc and copper, are believed to exist in the seabed. As global
population increases and human development levels rise, so too will the demand for natural
resources. Future or planned exploitation of those minerals found on the seafloor will naturally
lead governments and private industry to pay greater attention to their development.
In recent years, we have increasingly come to think of the ocean depths as a resource treasure
trove but, while less widely appreciated, we also rely on them to facilitate communications. By
2014, there were 213 submarine cable systems in operation, totalling 877,122 kilometres. All
regions of the globe are linked directly or indirectly via these systems. With lower operating costs
than satellites, undersea cables provide 97 percent of global data traffic and are essential to the
operation of the internet, as well as the communications and international financial industries, not
to mention national security. The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications
(SWIFT) transmits 15 million messages per day via submarine cables to more than
8,000 financial institutions in 208 countries or organizations. The US Clearing House Interbank
Payments System (CHIPS) processes over US$1 trillion per day in transactions to 22 countries.
Undersea cables also facilitate the transmission of electrical power; between mainland Australia
and Tasmania, for example, and they make possible the at-sea wind farms operated by Denmark,
Germany and the United Kingdom. 38 And last, submarine cables are useful as a tool to advance
our knowledge of the oceans. As part of a joint US-Canada project, they provide scientists with
35 Assaf Harel, “Preventing Terrorist Attacks on Offshore Platforms: Do States Have Sufficient Legal
Tools”, Harvard National Security Journal, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2012, p. 131.
36 Martinage, “Under the Sea: The Vulnerability of the Commons”, pp. 117-123.
37 In May 2014, it was announced that a Canadian company could be involved in the world’s first deep-sea
mine off the coast of New Guinea. See Ariana Kaknevicius, “Canadian mining company could be involved
in world’s first deep-sea mine”, Canadian Geographic (online), 13 May 2014 and Gemima Harvey, “The
Deep-sea Resources Rush”, The Diplomat, 20 August 2013. The major focus of current efforts is
manganese nodules (located below 4,000 metres), gas hydrates (between 350 and 5,000 metres), cobalt
crusts (found on the sides of undersea mountain ranges between 1,000 and 3,000 metres), and sulphides and
sulphide muds (between 500 and 4,000 metres). See “Marine minerals”, World Ocean Review, no date
[accessed on 7 September 2014 at http://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-1/energy/marine-minerals/].
38 Douglas Burnett, Tara M. Davenport and Robert C. Beckman, “Why Submarine Cables?” in Douglas Burnet,
Robert C. Beckman and Tara M. Davenport (eds.), Submarine Cables: The Handbook of Law and Policy
(Martinius Nijhoff: Leiden, 2014), pp. 1–2.
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