An environmental nonprofit and university researchers are applying marine vessel tracking technology to provide internet users a bird’s-eye view of global seabed mining activities.
The open-access online portal, called Deep-Sea Mining Watch, taps satellite signal technology to monitor industry ships as they search international waters for high-value metals on the ocean floor, including areas that have not been surveyed or studied by ocean scientists.
Those metals — including nickel, cobalt, copper and manganese — are bound up in potato-sized “polymetallic nodules” nestled within seafloor sediment thousands of feet below the ocean’s surface.
The web portal, co-developed by the nonprofit Global Fishing Watch and researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will rely on a technology widely used by mariners called automatic identification systems. Such systems rely on satellite signals transmitted from moving ocean vessels to help pilots identify other ships and avoid collisions.