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《经济学人·商论》2018-12-01
The seas are lovely, dark and deep
环境保护和深海采矿
Conservation and deep-ocean mining
环境保护和深海采矿
The seas are lovely, dark and deep
很快，人类的机器将撬开海神的宝库，拿走里面的矿藏。这对海底原住民们意味着什么？
Soon, human machinery will open Davy Jones’s locker and begin extracting the mineral riches therein. What will that mean for existing denizens of the abyss?
二〇一三年，伦敦自然历史博物馆研究员迪娃·阿蒙（Diva Amon）在考察位于热带太平洋的克拉里昂-克利珀顿区（CCZ）时收获了她的第一块鲸鱼头骨。它躺在海面下约4000米一处浅褐色的淤泥上，完全包覆在一层黑色之下。这一发现有两个值得注意的地方。首先，头骨的覆层意味着它已有数百万年的历史。这是因为，和那些吸引采矿者来到该区域的形同马铃薯的矿物结核一样，这层覆盖物也是由金属氧化物缓慢积聚而成。其次，这项发现凸显了人们对深海的了解极其有限。阿蒙这一块以及其他类似的鲸鱼头骨引发了对如何权衡海底采矿的经济效益和环境影响的追问。
DIVA AMON, a researcher at the Natural History Museum in London, spotted her first whale skull in 2013, during an expedition to the Clarion Clipperton Zone (CCZ) in the tropical Pacific. It sat on beige silt, some 4,000 metres beneath the sea’s surface, and was entirely covered in a black coating. Her find was twice notable. First, the skull’s coating meant it was millions of years old, for it was made of the same slowly accumulating metallic oxides as the potato-like ore nodules that are drawing miners to the area. Second, the discovery highlighted how little is known about the deep ocean. Dr Amon’s whale skull, and others like it, raise questions about the trade-offs between the economic gains of mining the seabed and that mining’s environmental consequences.


那些参与深海采矿的人们期冀它变成一个价值数万亿美元的产业。海底结核主要是铁的化合物（常见）和锰的化合物（罕见，但来自陆地矿井的供给充足），但也含有铜、镍和钴，有时还含有钼和钒等其他金属。对这些金属的需求足够大，所以到海底去探寻它们看起来是值得的。而且这些金属很少在陆地矿井中共存。因此，在有意开采这类海底结核的全球海洋矿产资源公司（以下简称GSR），负责深海采矿项目的克里斯·范尼琼（Kris Van Nijen）说：“花费同样的力气，你得到的金属种类和陆地上两三个矿井一样多。”
Those involved in deep-sea mining hope it will turn into a multi-billion dollar industry. Seabed nodules are dominated by compounds of iron (which is commonplace) and manganese (which is rarer, but not in short supply from mines on dry land). However, the nodules also contain copper, nickel and cobalt, and sometimes other metals such as molybdenum and vanadium. These are in sufficient demand that visiting the bottom of the ocean to acquire them looks a worthwhile enterprise. Moreover, these metals seldom co-occur in terrestrial mines. So, as Kris Van Nijen, who runs deep-sea mining operations at Global Sea Mineral Resources (GSR), a company interested in exploiting the nodules, observes: “For the same amount of effort, you get the same metals as two or three mines on land.”


深海地狱
Hades’ hall
从一个角度来看，位于海面以下几千米使得这些结核难以获取，但从另一个层面来说却又是容易的，因为它们一动不动地躺在海床上，几乎是等着被人采集。大部分结核位于像CCZ这类在沿海国家200海里专属经济区以外的海底区域，它们因而属于国际海底管理局（以下简称ISA）的职责范围。该局已为这类资源颁发了17份勘探许可。其中除了一份许可外，其余都在CCZ这个位于夏威夷东南偏东约600万平方公里的区域。
Though their location several kilometres beneath the ocean surface makes the nodules hard to get at in one sense, in another they are easily accessible, because they sit invitingly on the seabed, almost begging to be collected. Most are found on parts of the ocean floor like the CCZ, outside the 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zones of littoral countries. They thus fall under the purview of the International Seabed Authority (ISA), which has issued 17 exploration licences for such resources. All but one of these licences pertain to the CCZ, an area of about 6m square kilometres east-south-east of Hawaii.
保护深海生态，第一步是要确定到底什么“神奇生物”在那里生活。比如，你知道主题图中这种凝胶状的黄色“软糖松鼠”是什么吗？它和同伴们的生活会被深海采矿影响到什么程度？欢迎下载《经济学人·商论》App，订阅后即可阅读科技版深海探秘主题文章：
  • 《幽深迷人的海》（The seas are lovely, dark and deep）
  • 《无遗珠，不匮乏》（Waste not, want not）免费文章
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