The three-year voyage of the HMS Challenger was one of the greatest scientific expeditions in an era with quite a few of them. The former warship departed England in 1872 with a complement of 237 on a mission to collect marine specimens and also to map and sample huge swaths of the seafloor.
The ship traveled 125,936 kilometers, and the mission succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its backers. It discovered 4,700 new marine species, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and the Mariana Trench. Its bathymetric data, collected laboriously with a weighted line, was used to make the seafloor maps that guided the route of an early transatlantic telegraph cable. But the crew’s most puzzling discovery was made on 18 February 1873, while dredging an abyssal plain near the Canary Islands. The dredging apparatus came up loaded with potato-size nodules; subsequent analysis found them to be rich in manganese, nickel, and iron. It was the first of many such hauls by the Challenger crew, from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific, where the dredges sometimes yielded a briny jumble of the dark-gray nodules, shark’s teeth, and, oddly, whale ear bones.
Quite soon, we’re all going to find out whether existing technology can be used to harvest those nodules and recover their valuable metals at costs competitive with more traditional mining techniques. And the timing is hardly coincidental. Over the next decade, a great shift to electric vehicles is expected to drive up demand for cobalt, nickel, copper, and...
Read Full Story: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-seabed-solution
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