Metal-rich "smoke" billows from a volcanic vent on the seafloor near the Galápagos Islands
UCSB/Univ S Carolina/NOAA/WHOI
After September 11, 2001, David Heydon was a dreamer in need of a dream, an entrepreneur in search of an enterprise. A native of Brisbane, Australia, he had transplanted himself to New York during the dot-com boom and had tried to flog a new kind of customer-relations software to airlines—an idea that did not survive the post-9/11 travel slump. Heydon slunk back to Brisbane. There he reconnected with Julian Malnic, an old friend from his student days at the University of New South Wales, and unexpectedly found himself on a whole new path.
Malnic was a mining journalist who had crossed to the other side: He was sitting on a claim to a patch of volcanic seafloor off the coast of Papua New Guinea. There was gold in those submarine volcanoes, Malnic said, and copper, too—but it was going to take a lot of capital to raise it to the surface. Heydon had studied geology with Malnic. He knew that if there were rich mineral deposits near Papua New Guinea, there were many more of them all along the Ring of Fire, which includes a chain of underwater volcanoes winding from New Zealand to Japan. At 45, Heydon hadn’t worked for anyone but himself in more than 20 years and didn’t want to start again now. He was looking for his next big thing. “You can’t get much bigger than this,” he thought.
Heydon signed on with Nautilus Minerals, Malnic’s start-up, and pretty soon replaced Malnic as chief executive and—for the first four years, at least—the company’s sole employee. His solitude did not help his case as he tried to raise funds. Mining on the ground is hard enough; extracting minerals from the ocean bottom is perceived to be so difficult that many potential investors were unwilling to take the financial risk. “Surely if it was going to happen,” Heydon remembers his would-be investors saying, “it would be done by a big mining company, not some guy sitting in a study in Brisbane.” He traveled the world on his credit card, until that was no longer enough. “So I sold off my backyard,” he says. “My wife had a tennis court and a swimming pool. That gave us the funds to proceed.”
And even to succeed, almost. By late 2006 Heydon had taken Nautilus from Australia to Canada and from an empty shell to a credible operation that had secured the backing of major mining companies such as Teck Cominco and Anglo-American. Nautilus had a ship under construction, a contract out for a giant seafloor-mining robot, and $266 million in the bank. It even had an environmental impact statement at the ready to persuade environmentalists and local Papua New Guineans that the company’s mining scheme would not unduly harm the ocean. Heydon’s team (he then had a staff of 60) had every reason to believe they would begin pulling up rich copper ore in 2010.
Material sucked up by a huge remote-controlled robot will be
lifted through a steel pipe to a transport ship.
Nautilus Minerals
Then the global financial crisis hit. Suddenly it was no longer clear whether Nautilus Minerals would become the first company ever to tap the fantastic mineral resources of the deep sea—or just the latest in a long line of dreams dashed on the rocks of economic reality.
Mining the ocean is a tantalizing idea that never seems to die. In the 1920s the Nobel Prize–winning chemist Fritz Haber dreamed of paying Germany’s World War I reparations with gold sifted from seawater. His cash-strapped country even devoted a series of oceanographic expeditions to the idea. It didn’t work out. Although there are millions of tons of gold in the world’s oceans, it is extremely diluted: In every hundred million tons of seawater, roughly a gram of gold can be found.
From the 1960s through the 1980s, a new set of entrepreneurs latched onto the idea of mining manganese nodules, black lumps of rock—some as big as baseballs—in which metals are more concentrated than they are in seawater. Vast stretches of seafloor mud are littered with these things, which bear a striking resemblance to horse droppings. One influential textbook published in 1965 estimated that there were a trillion metric tons of nodules in the Pacific alone, and a publication in 1977 calculated that the North Pacific contained billions of tons of manganese and hundreds of millions of tons of nickel and copper.
Hundreds of millions of dollars of investment later, plunging metal prices, increased energy costs, and confusing claims to ownership flattened that boom before any ore was delivered to the surface. It did not help that the biggest ocean-mining research operation turned out to be a CIA front; the spooks were hoisting a sunken Russian sub, not manganese nodules, from the seafloor.
But around the time the nodule dream was dissolving, a new one was taking its place—the one that would grip Heydon two decades later. On land, some of the biggest and most concentrated metal ores occur in deposits called volcanogenic massive sulfides. For decades geologists had noticed suspiciously marine-looking fossils embedded in those ores. In the late 1970s they finally understood why. Exploring off the coast of Baja California in 1979, researchers diving in the submersible Alvin saw plumes of black, metal-rich “smoke” billowing from a volcanic hot spring on the seafloor. The smoke—actually plumes of cloudy water—was so hot it melted the tip of their thermometer; it was 350 degrees Celsius (about 650°F). As the plume from the hot spring struck the surrounding near-freezing seawater, some of it was flash-freezing to form tall, stalagmite-like chimneys. The rest spewed from the chimney tops and fell out onto the surrounding seafloor. The smoke turned out to contain concentrated metal sulfides, which the superheated salt water was drawing out from the volcanic rock under the seafloor.
Since then, oceanographers have found hundreds of these black smokers (technically known as hydrothermal vents) and learned a great deal about how they work. Over time the smokers come and go, and the chimneys that form above them grow and topple, such that they can eventually build up a massive mound on the seafloor. And over millions of years, the movement and collisions of tectonic plates have lifted some of these seafloor sulfide mounds onto land, where they have been discovered and mined. The giant Kidd Creek mine in Ontario, Canada, is an example; miners there descend through shafts more than a mile deep to extract copper, zinc, and silver from an ancient chunk of seafloor. “These deposits are scattered all over the world on land,” says Steve Scott, a geologist emeritus from the University of Toronto who has consulted for Nautilus. “And they’re forming today on the seafloor.”
Scott started looking for the ocean-bottom mineral outcroppings in the western Pacific in the 1980s, in collaboration with an Australian geologist named Ray Binns. They towed cameras above the seafloor, dredged rock samples from promising locales, and went down to have a look whenever they could score access to a submersible. Their hope was that understanding how ores formed on the seafloor would help in the search for minable deposits on land. “We were not prospectors,” Scott says. “But it turns out we found a potential mine deposit. We did much better than we thought we would.”
