h a l f b a k e r yWhy on earth would you want that many gazelles anyway?
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As far as I understand it, the BIG deal with these nodules is that they contain copper, nickel, manganese and cobalt, and there's a lot of buzz about dredging the sea floor to harvest them for battery production. On the plus side, it means less strip mining. On the negative side, it's basically saying fuck the local sea life. John Oliver did a special on these a few weeks ago. [Neutral] |
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//act like a big battery// |
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Umm ... how would you identify the anode and cathode of a large quantity of nodules lying around on the sea floor? |
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I read about that 'dark oxygen' thing.
The thing is, I don't see how the chemistry works. |
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If the metals are crystallising out of the water, that's fine. The environment is presumably such that this is favoured.
But if the nodules are electrolysing water, wouldn't that be the opposite reaction, and corrode them away again? |
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This makes me think that perhaps rather than taking 'millions of years' to produce the nodules, maybe the process is quite fast, and reversible.
If that's the case, maybe harvesting them wouldn't be as disastrous for the ecosystem as some people are making out, if it was done in an appropriate manner. You might just need to spread some seed crystals, when the conditions were right, and they'd regrow. |
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I once figured out a way to harvest manganese nodules from the bottom of the Marianas trench without harming the ecology just for shits and giggles. |
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They're just scattered around the seafloor like so many marbles.
Worth more than their weight in gold with a seven nation consortium waiting to get paid from the first guy to apply for the mining permit and pull it off. |
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//Worth more than their weight in gold// |
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I doubt that. I've visited a manganese mine (on dry land), and there was a very large lump of the stuff - some cubic metres - lying around outside (as if to demonstrate "this is what we mine here"). That might not be the case if it sold for more than gold. |
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It was an unusual mine site, in that the safety briefing was mostly about crocodiles. |
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I'm trying to remember where I got that from. Something to do with the difficulty of getting to the bottom of the Marianas trench and the seven nation split on the goods, but a quick search shows that China has that buttoned up now, so there goes that get rich slow scheme. |
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