Underwater Facilities and Mining the Ocean Fabien Cousteau, is the grandson of Jacques Cousteau, arguably one of the greatest underwater specialists and oceanographers. Jacques Cousteau invented the aqualung in 1943 in Paris with the help of Emile Gagnan an engineer. We all know how incredible that invention was because it opened up areas of the ocean which before that needed heavy diving equipment which limited movement and vision. Jacques Cousteau was a visionary. Fabian Cousteau has put forth a plan to build an underwater laboratory for want of a better word, on the bottom of the ocean. When I first heard about this, it put me in mind of several horror movies I had seen on the same subject. They were fiction of course but they were hard to forget. The first one was ”The Abyss.” Who could ever forget that one? A civilian team at an underwater-base drill for oil on the ocean floor. An American submarine sinks and the U.S. Navy starts a search and orders the civilians to help. They send down divers, one of which has his brain affected and starts to make irrational decisions putting everybody at risk. One thing leads to another and the underwater base is put into jeopardy and is eventually visited by a sort of alien drone made out of water in the shape of a human. Eventually aliens save the manager of the civilians. This is one of my favorite underwater movies. Leviathan was an underwater movie which was made in 1989 and is about a deep-sea mining colony. The movie has a message, never bring back something to your home base you don’t understand. This message should also be useful to NASA who intends to bring back samples from Mars. In this movie the deep-sea minors find a wreck of a Soviet ship and on it is a cargo they bring back which turns out to be a genetic mutation which hunts them down one by one. In this movie the underwater base is down 16,000 feet and the crew are composed of eight men. The idea of the underwater facility is to extract silver and other precious metals from the ocean, and this is been talked about in real life. The next movie I want to talk about is DeepStar Six. This one is about the construction of an underwater base. The base also employs a missile sled which is being maneuvered into position when one of the men warns the ground should be checked first to make sure there are no geological faults. A cavern is found under the area and an order comes down to collapse the cavern and have the missiles installed by the end of the week. A tractor is sent in to collapse the cavern, but has to make a quick escape when it is in danger. A probe was released into the cavern and the front of the tractor which is a mini submarine is sent in, but a sonar contact is seen quickly heading for them. The sub has to shut down and turn off its lights in order for the contact to lose interest. One thing leads to another and the computer mistakenly detonates a missile which causes damage to the underwater base. Repairs take place outside, but when the worker comes back in, he doesn’t realize it but a huge crab like creature enters behind him. I think you can probably guess what happens after that and is not good for the crew and only two survive. Even with these problems, there is a push to get onto the ocean floor and start mining. It is thought it is inevitable since the ocean floor makes up 71% of our area. This means while we may have exhausted many mines on land, the ocean floor is still virgin territory. One of the countries which would benefit the most is the United States which has to rely on rare-earth minerals coming from China and other countries which are not too friendly to us. One of the roadblocks for us is the fact we are not a member of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and have no representative. On the other hand, China belongs to it and therefore can make recommendations. People would be surprised to know how much wealth is underwater. Let’s take the Dead Sea for example, it certainly doesn’t compare in size to the oceans of the world being only a little over 233 square miles and yet it has been estimated the minerals in the Dead Sea are worth about 4 billion dollars. If we compare this to the Pacific Ocean, we find the surface area to be 63.78 million square miles. The Atlantic Ocean is 41.10 million square miles. The truth of the matter is we can’t even make an estimate of the value of the minerals in either one of these oceans it is so enormous. These oceans are gold mines just waiting to happen. The first company to actually succeed in making a profit by mining the seafloor will become enormously successful. One can only imagine how much their stock would sell for. They would have the potential of becoming the most successful mining operation the world has ever seen. That is why it is so important for this to be fair competition and not favor one country over the other by the UN. Unfortunately for us, the UN is not a big fan of the United States and truthfully, they have never been. All they want from us is to pay most of their budget.
|
