Deep-Sea Mining: A whirlwind tour of the state of the industry and current policy regimes

On April 28, 2022, I was invited to give a short talk to a gathering of Environmental NGO representatives to provide an overview and my perspective on the current state of development for deep-sea mining. Below is the transcript of that talk.

Good afternoon and thank you for inviting me. Today I’m going to give you a very brief whirlwind tour of the current state of deep-sea mining and the policy regime around this developing industry.

The first thing I need to highlight is that we often talk about deep-sea mining as one cohesive thing, but it’s really four separate and distinct industries, all developing in tandem, with significant differences in the types of metals targeted, the technology necessary to exploit those metals, and the motivations for doing so.

Read More

The climate denial industry in full swing, 5 storms rage across the Atlantic, and Orcas seek vengeance – What’s up with the Oceans this week?

Denial Incorporated. Over the weekend, the Administration announced the appointment of David Legates, an anti-science activist embedded in the climate denial industry. Legates will answer directly to acting NOAA administrator Neil Jacobs. Expect to see Legates making the media rounds downplaying the impact of climate change on the occurrence of more frequent and powerful tropical storms because…

There are currently 5 active tropical cyclones in the Atlantic. This has only ever been documented once before. Historically, we are just entering the most active part of the Atlantic Hurricane season and it’s already time to move on to Greek letters. The next earliest 20th named storm was Tropical Storm Tammy, which formed October 5, 2005.

Killer whales are attacking boats in the Mediterranean. Ok, then.

Upwelling.

This is possibly the grimmest climate change model I’ve seen in a long time: New Climate Maps Show a Transformed United States.

A decade of failures in Science Communication.

Eleven years is a long life for a science blog. Southern Fried Science was born in 2008, when the main writers were all graduate students. Over the last decade the online landscape has changed. Science Communication changed with it, adapting and evolving to meet an ever-shifting ecosystem. Looking back on the last decade and thinking about the next, it’s becoming easier to see where we went wrong. It’s not quite as easy to determine what we need to correct the course.

This is not a scientific assessment, this is my own personal observations from the last decade of running Southern Fried Science, from teaching Social Media for Environmental Communications for the last 7 years, from working with Upwell, one of the most dynamic and visionary ocean NGOs ever conceived, from helping build and launch multiple online platforms, dozens of novel programs, and hundreds of outreach campaigns, and from spending a lot of time since November 2016 reflecting on what we’ve done wrong.

That Hideous Deficit

Do we really need another 200 words on how bad the deficit model is and why it needs to die?

Apparently, yes.

The basic premise: that science perception and policy is shaped by an information deficit and that if we just make good science education content and spread it, we can combat the spread of misinformation, people will learn, and everything will get better.

It doesn’t work. It never worked. And it ignores the reality that misinformation is manufactured for political and financial gain, with tremendous incentives and, often, far better funding than science outreach campaigns. But beyond that, multiple studies have shown that, when confronted with information that challenges their fundamental world view, people don’t throw out their worldview, they reject the science, creating a more entrenched and intractable audience.

Read More

A brutal slog through some of the worst ocean and climate news of the summer. Also, fish cannons. [Tuesday] Morning Salvage: August 13, 2019.

Foghorn (A Call to Action!)

  • Trump Administration Guts Endangered Species Act, setting back conservation efforts by decades, dooming thousands of charismatic species to extinction, and sealing his legacy as the racist president that is unambiguously worse than Nixon. Look, at this point, if you aren’t calling your representatives on the regular to demand impeachment, I don’t know what to tell you.

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

Image: Pierre Markuse (Flickr)
Read More

After mining a seabed is forever changed, divers do good and bad, eating plastic, a Musk mystery sub, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: June 17, 2019

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

Mr Harry Chan (in blue t-shirt) with divers who have joined his cause from Today Online.
Read More

A song of mostly just fire, how to hide a nuclear submarine, toasty anemones, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: May 20, 2019.

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

Read More

I spent 50 days working out in Virtual Reality and everything went better than expected.

For the last several years, I’ve been working off the weight gained and fitness lost from a decade of grad school, post-doctoral research, job hunting, and, ultimately, launching my own company. The gym, to put it mildly, had not been a priority. Running and weight training went a long way towards getting me back to where I wanted to be, but I had hit a plateau. Every spring and summer I’d make incremental improvements, every winter, I’d fall back into old habits. It was a sustainable situation, but not fantastic.

Last summer, I set a goal for myself. While the weather was just on the wrong side of that threshold that makes running something I’m willing to do first thing in the morning, I would instead swap out my sneakers for an Oculus Rift, and spend an hour, four or five days a week, playing fitness-oriented virtual reality games, for fifty sessions. That schedule would get me through the winter and hopefully keep me more active than I otherwise would.

To better illustrate this plan, I made a GIF, just for you:

Yes, it’s me. Yes, we put googly eyes on the Oculus.

Unsurprisingly, the science behind Virtual Reality and exercise is still in its infancy.

Read More

Burning driftwood, new protections for Canada’s oceans, dolphin errant, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: May 13, 2019

Foghorn (A Call to Action!)

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

  • Good news everybody! Canada bans deep-sea mining, oil and gas drilling in marine protected areas.
Nicolas Pilcher (left), from Malaysia’s Marine Research Foundation, shows a fisherman how to install a turtle excluder device (TED). Photo courtesy of Marine Research Foundation Asia
Read More