Nodules, nurdles and mining

This article was written by Anthony Lipmann. All views and opinions expressed are strictly his own.

Of the 32,000 species of fish (more than birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians combined), there is one called the Flapjack Devilfish (Opisthoteuthis), an octopus found 2000m underwater. It also happens to reside where sea miners want to pillage nodules of minerals on the ocean floor.

I first met a group of lawyers from the environmental charity called Client Earth about fifteen years ago when I gave a talk about how one small urban town in the Copperbelt - by bearing the brunt of sulphur pollution from the local smelter - was unintentionally paying the environmental price for handsome margins at the mining house that owned it.

These young men and women had set up Client Earth with the idea of making our planet - rather than big business - their client. It was a concept that has worked well, with a steady stream of young lawyers prepared to advocate for the planet on a pittance rather than accept the inducements available to those defending the indefensible.

Not in hock to any group, the charity has taken on many entities and causes relating to the environment. This includes Ineos whose prospective massive ethane plant for plastics in Antwerp will increase the world’s nurdle count dramatically – the clusters of micro-plastics that litter the oceans. From nodules to nurdles, Client Earth is making the case for our pescatarian world before our financial bottom feeders.

As Nasa’s Artemis sets off for the moon, adding further junk to space, one commentator on the BBC Today Programme mentioned that one of the mission’s aims was to seek minerals such as rare earths. Isn’t it amazing how fiction sells? As anyone involved with the lanthanides knows (and in which our company trades) there is no shortage of rare earth minerals on our present planet – just a shortage of process. Dig deep enough and you might even find some in your garden.

The issue, as always, is not shortage, but hype and banal greed. If you can sell the idea of seabed mining to investors, who will speak for the Flapjack Devilfish?

As we stand on this new mining threshold, ready to hoover up the seabed and boost mining house share values, we do not merely threaten the 33% of fish already lost to by-catch (including rare sharks) but ruin the habitat for all species higher up the food chain. It’s the sand-eel story all over again (humans voraciously harvesting sand-eels for fertilizer and so threatening the survival of the guillemot, the tern and the puffin).

And here’s another Client Earth stat – last year (2025) scientists discovered the largest deep-sea coral reef on the Blake Plateau off the coast of America, as long as the M1 motorway (310 miles long) and with 83,000 individual coral mountain peaks. It’s where the first ‘controlled test’ of deep-sea mining took place 50 years ago. What was an entire world of fish on that test site is now a mere desolate mud track.

Some people who wonder at the direction the world is heading may have cause to recall the 1946 U.S. nuclear bomb tests on the Bikini Atoll (a place that gave its name to a two-piece scanty swimsuit for reason of its hoped-for explosive effect on the male of the human species). Bikini was a coral island of unspeakable beauty and peace that someone in a meeting room far away decided was a fit place to test man’s most inhuman weapon.

Today, when we see how man-made islands in the Middle East can be vulnerable when built on sand and desalination plants, you would have thought mining the seabed would have reminded the world of the consequences of our industrial actions. But then again ‘thinking’ and ‘experts’ are not the flavour of the month.

Wasn’t there something in the bible about building your house on sand?