From mountains to the deep blue sea

Around 60 miles north of Oahu, Hawaii, a research vessel named the Kilo Moana held an international team of scientists for a month this spring, when they conducted the first of many potential studies in one of the most remote environments on earth.

Aboard the vessel rocking on the ocean’s surface, associate professor Matt Church from the Flathead Lake Biological Station sat alongside his temporary colleagues from Hawaii, England, Sweden and Scotland as they drove a robot across the seabed, 5,000 meters below.

The project, called the Simmons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology (SCOPE) Cruise, provided scientists such as Church a glimpse into the largely unexplored deep sea, in order to evaluate and catalogue the biodiversity of its organisms.

Remote and difficult to reach, the deep sea contains vast quantities of rare earth metal deposits, or nodules, resting in fields on the surface of the sea floor.

According to Church, the nodules, crumbly cement-like clumps composed largely of magnesium, contain iron, copper, cobalt, nickel and other metals currently obtained primarily from terrestrial mines.

However, as quantities available in land-based mines begin to dwindle over the next few years, Church said the price of those precious metals will climb, making deep-sea mining a more economically feasible endeavor.

Several countries, including the U.S., have already staked claims within the immense prospective mining zone, which spans almost from one coast to the other across the Pacific.

Nodule mining in the Pacific, however, could have the potential to create more problems than it would solve, according to Church.

It takes thousands and thousands of years for the nodules to form, and once they’re gone, Church said, they’re gone.

“Once they do it, they’re done. It’s not a renewable resource in a realistic timeframe,” he said.

Current mining techniques also present a grave hazard to underwater environments, not just in the deep, but at various levels in the ocean.

Deep-sea mining essentially vacuums up everything within a specified zone of seabed. The materials collected go through a filtering process, separating the desirable nodules from the leftover silt, which is then discarded back into the ocean. The depth at which the sediment gets released affects the oxygen and light levels at that oceanic zone, upsetting the stability of its organisms.

“[The sites] are so poorly understood right now that I think our hope is that we’re going to proivde some new information that will let people see for themselves that these are really...sensative habitats in the sense that if there is disturbance there, it will take decades or longer for those systems to recover,” Church said.

Thanks to regulations set by the International Seabed Authority to protect areas of particular environmental interest, or APEI zones, mining cannot start until the completion of an impact study and a baseline survey of biodiversity both in the potential mining regions and the refuges set aside to repopulate mining zones.

Though deep sea mining is most likely still a few years out, according to Church, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, a private organization focused on environmental conservation, took a vested interest in its potential impact and funded the SCOPE Cruise’s preliminary study of the abyssal zones.

Led by Craig Smith, a professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaii, the international team included experts in every class of oceanic organism, from fish to phytoplankton.

A specialist on the small end of the spectrum, Church studies aquatic microbial ecology, with the majority of his career focused on the ocean.

According to Church, the ocean produces roughly half of the planet’s oxygen, and microbes, the microscopic organisms he studies, produce the vast majority of the oxygen in the ocean.

Though much about deep-sea microbes remains a mystery, Church said what he does know is that they are absolutely critical for the functioning in the ocean.

Church made the leap from the University of Hawaii, where he worked as a professor of oceanography, to the Universtiy of Montana in 2016 to help transfer some of the recent advancements in oceanographic research to the bio station’s efforts on Flathead Lake.

During his time in Hawaii, Church worked closely with Smith on previous research projects and was one of the first scientists Smith contacted when assembling his team for the SCOPE Cruise.

Eager to explore an environment ripe for discovery, Church jumped at the opportunity to join the study, convincing his post-doctorate colleague from the bio station, Emma Wear, to join him.

“Mining and everything else aside, just the fact that we were able to go to this really remote place and study the deep sea I think is super cool,” Church said.

“I hope we will have an effect on policy in a good way,” Wear added. “Even if we don’t, it was some really cool science. We will have found some really neat stuff about the deep sea that is valuable in its own right.”

Because of the crushing pressure found at such depths, deep-sea exploration requires its own unique class of instruments, much like the rovers sent into space.

The unmanned submersible, called a remotely operated vehicle (ROV), uses lights and a video camera to give its operator a glimpse into the dark abyss.

Equipped with manipulator arms, the ROV allowed Church and his team to carefully extract water, sediment and nodule samples from the refuges between mining zones and hoist them to the surface, where they were frozen for later study back in the bio station lab.

Other scientists on board the vessel collected video and specimens of the strange and diverse creatures of the deep, some of which had never been seen before.

“I kept thinking it was like sampling on Mars or the moon or something,” Church said.

Over the next several months, Church and Wear will systematically analyze the samples taken on the cruise to better understand the types of organisms found in the mining region and their roles within the deep-sea environment.

By collecting information about the variety and abundance of organisms inhabiting the deep sea, Church and Wear are helping to determine the potential impact of mining disturbances on the biogeochemistry, or elemental make-up, and the ecology of the region and the ocean as a whole.

“I just don’t think we have a good sense of what [mining] is going to do,” Wear said. “Certainly from a biodiversity, ‘save the cute critters’ perspective, it’s bad. It’s definitely bad.”

She and Church hope that the information drawn from their venture will influence policy and regulations governing prospective mining, if it comes to pass.

“I’d like to think that the research we’re doing will help inform the formulation of those policies or regulations, as far as what makes the most sense in terms of conservation of the habitat in that area,” Church said.

Reporter Mary Cloud Taylor can be reached at 758-4459 or mtaylor@dailyinterlake.com.