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| Opponents to deep seabed mining southeast of Hawai'i held a protest Thursday when the mining ship Hidden Gem came into Hawaiian waters. Photo from Greenpeace |
The Case bills before Congress would impose a moratorium on mining of the sea
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| Solomon Pili Kaho'ohalahala protested the arrival of the deep seabed mining ship Hidden Gem in Hawaiian waters. Photo from Greanpeace |
“Some of these species have had surprising benefits to humanity, including enzymes from one microbe found in deep-sea hydrothermal vents being used to develop COVID-19 tests. In addition, the deep ocean is one of our planet’s largest and most important stores of carbon and could play a critical role in the fight against climate change.
“Yet all of these species and natural processes, and in fact our entire marine ecosystem, are now imperiled by the imminent commencement of large-scale commercial seabed mining operations. Seabed mining could take a number of destructive forms, including methods which would shear off seamounts on the ocean floor, the functional equivalent of strip mining.”
Case said the American Seabed Protection Act would place a moratorium on deep-sea mining activities in American waters or by American companies on the high seas. It also tasks the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Academies of Science with conducting a comprehensive
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| One of the underwater machines of Hidden Gem, the deep seabed mining ship that met protests in Hawai'i on Thursday. Image from Seatools |
assessment of how mining activities could affect ocean species, carbon sequestration processes and communities that rely on the ocean.
The International Seabed Protection Act would require the United States to oppose international and other national seabed mining efforts until the President certifies that the International Seabed Authority has adopted a suitable regulatory framework which will guarantee protection for these unique ecosystems and the communities that rely on them.
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| Hidden Gem, a 748 foot-long deep seabed mining ship was subject of protests when it came into Hawaiian waters on Thursday. Its operators plan to mine the seabed southeast of Hawai'i. Photo from Allseas |
“The studies outlined in Representative Case’s bill are an important first step in understanding the environmental and social impacts of mining the deep ocean seabed. This research will give us the information we need to make appropriate decisions about deep sea mining in U.S. waters and will be invaluable in combating the climate crisis and preserving the biodiversity and health of our oceans for future generations.“
Congressman Jared Huffman (D-CA), said, “Mining in pristine, fragile ecosystems like the seabed could open a pandoras box of unintended consequences reaching far beyond the excavation sites. “This kind of activity could decimate fish and marine mammal populations, destroy ecosystems, and inhibit carbon sequestration. Extracting industries should not have carte blanche access to what are some of the last untouched places on our planet. I’m glad to be joining Rep. Case on these bills to prevent the exploitation of seabeds before the proper research and regulations can be established.”
CO2 EMISSIONS CAN HELP PREDICT VOLCANIC ERUPTIONS, according to Volcano Watch, the the weekly article by U.S. Geological Survey Hawaiian Volcano Observatory scientists and affiliates.
Titled Sniffing out stealthy gas escape between Kīlauea's eruptions, it notes:
Kīlauea has erupted three times in 2023—January–March, June, and September—and has also experienced significant intrusive activity to the southwest of the summit since the beginning of October.
During eruptions, the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory frequently reports sulfur dioxide (SO2) emission rates as a means of tracking the progression of eruptive activity. But for the periods before eruptions, or when there is an ongoing intrusion with no eruption, most of the data that HVO relies on is geophysical data, like deformation or seismicity, rather than geochemical data like SO2 emissions.
However, as Volcano Watch has discussed before, there is another type of gas that can be important during non-eruptive periods—carbon dioxide (CO2).
CO2 behaves very differently from SO2 in Kīlauea's magmatic system, and these differences can be exploited to help better understand processes occurring beneath the ground surface. For example, CO2 can begin to escape from Kīlauea's magma when it is still many kilometers (miles) beneath the surface even though SO2 is largely released when magma is just a few tens or hundreds of meters (yards) beneath the surface. In a practical sense, this often means that we don't see much SO2 being emitted until lava begins erupting at the surface.
Because CO2 escapes the magma from deeper, we should be able to see changes in the amount of CO2 coming from Kīlauea as magma gets shallower, even if it's not shallow enough to erupt yet.
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The tricky thing about CO2, though, is that it is already present—and highly variable—in the atmosphere. This is different from SO2—SO2 is not normally present in background atmosphere, so it's easy to pick out a volcanic SO2 signal in ambient air measurements. But atmospheric CO2 can vary over the course of a day, as well as with the seasons. So, picking out a small volcanic CO2 signal from variable amounts in the background atmosphere can be tough, and it has indeed proved difficult over the years aboth Kīlauea and Mauna Loa.
Recently, however, in cooperation with colleagues at the USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory, we have been looking a little closer at CO2 data from Kīlauea. We have a multi-GAS station just to the southwest of Halemaʻumaʻu that measures four volcanic gases (CO2, SO2, hydrogen sulfide, and water vapor) as well as meteorological data like wind speed and wind direction. Instead of using all the CO2 data from the multi-GAS, which can be noisy because of background variations in CO2, we separate out CO2 data that reaches the station from certain directions at certain wind speeds. This allows us to try to isolate the volcanic CO2 signal.
What have we seen? Well, the data are still noisy, so instead of looking at individual data points (up to eight per day), we calculate weekly averages of the CO2 concentration. Once we do that, if we look only at data coming from two portions of Halemaʻumaʻu (roughly the western part of the crater and the southeastern part of the crater) at moderate wind speeds, we see patterns in the CO2 concentration relative to the recent summit eruptions.
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| USGS scientists measure CO2, SO2 and other gases using infrared technology. USGS photo |
For both wind directions we look at, we can see that CO2 coming from those directions appeared to increase—slowly and slightly—before the June and September Kīlauea summit eruptions. Once the eruptions occurred, CO2 concentrations dropped back down. Now, since the September eruption, those CO2 concentrations are increasing again, and the increase is likely related to the intrusion of magma into the shallow storage regions beneath the summit and south caldera regions.
Often when Kīlauea erupts, HVO uses the low ratio of eruptive CO2 to SO2 to be able to say that the magma feeding the eruption was stored very shallow because that low ratio tells us the magma already degassed most of its CO2 before eruption. What we're seeing right now is that pre-eruptive CO2 loss in the form of these CO2 increases before eruptions as magma gets closer to the surface.
The next step with this new data analysis method is to try to turn the CO2 concentration data into emission rates of CO2, which could then perhaps tell us not just that magma is rising to shallow depths beneath Kīlauea, but how much magma is rising.
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