Prospecting Ocean. The extractivist Wild West

Régine Debatty

Unless you live on a small-ish island, chances are you’re just like me: you suffer from sea blindness, this disregard (or maybe we’re talking about sheer ignorance) of the crucial role that the oceans play in absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, in regulating global climate, generating oxygen or providing livelihoods for communities.

But if we don’t understand how important this vast ecosystem is for our survival on Earth, we’ll end up leaving it into the hands of private companies to colonize and pollute its surfaces and depths.

Commercial deep sea mining is a case in point. Hailed as the answer to depleting mineral resources, deep sea mining -we are told- could ensure unabated economic growth, supplying silver, gold, copper, manganese, cobalt, nickel, zinc and rare earth minerals for the tech industry and even assisting the transition to a renewable energy economy. It would be profitable, ensure our techno-dependent future but the impacts on fragile (and understudied) ecosystems are potentially disastrous. It could even have knock-on effects on the wider ocean environment and threaten the global fight against climate breakdown by disrupting carbon stores in seafloor sediments, reducing the ocean’s ability to store it.

The colonisation of the seabed would be an underwater mirror to what the shipping industry has been quietly doing for years on the surface of the oceans.

Prospecting Ocean, a body of work by the filmmaker and photographer Armin Linke currently participating to the Foto/Industria festival in Bologna, explores the challenges oceans are facing today from the perspective of legislation, science, the mining industry and local populations whose livelihood is threatened by extractive practices. Drawing upon three years of expeditions to the Pacific Ocean, interviews with experts, archive material and rare footage of the deep-sea, the exhibition scrutinizes seabed mining and other forms of extraction and the effects they might have on marine life and communities. His research makes it clear that ecological protection of our oceans is incompatible with their economic exploitation (which is not at the moment as highly lucrative and straightforward as it was hoped.) If anyone had any doubt about it.

Part of Linke’s research zooms in on Papua New Guinea where licences have been granted to excavate seabed for minerals, threatening ecosystems, lifestyles, health as well as economic and political self-determination.

Linke quickly made the connections between the theme of resource exploitation and the new visualisation technologies developed in the 1970s. “I became intrigued by visualisation techniques developed in the 1970s such as sonar, which allowed for the mapping of the ocean floors, the artist explained in an interview. “This type of sound measurement was then translated by cartographers and bathymetrists who drew underwater topography. Subsequently, a legal structure was established. Now, nations can extend their economic territory by making a request to the United Nations. Such geopolitical requests for the colonisation of the seabed are based on images that have legal validity. It is fascinating to see how visual media have historical consequences of this type.”

As such Linke’s Prospecting Ocean fits perfectly into the general theme of the Foto/Industria biennial: The Technosphere, the relentless technological saturation of our planet.

I could have spent hours inside the Bologna University Library scrutinising the archive material, photos, videos and other sources of information. The images are not all aesthetically stunning but the little known realities they depict are fascinating: videos filmed at United Nations assemblies, in international law conferences, at marine research centres and at sites endangered by sea-level rise and now also by seabed mining.

Please find some of them below. Some of them are commented. Most are not.

The International Seabed Authority organises and regulates all mineral-related activities in the international seabed (outside of national waters.) According to Greenpeace, far from protecting our oceans, the UN body are selling it off to industries which only objective is to plunder ocean floors for profit. The picture they depicts is bleak. The non-governmental environmental organization accuses the ISA of consistently siding with the deep sea mining companies, of lack of transparency, of ignoring environmental concerns, of being composed mostly by members who have little biological or ecological expertise, etc.

Remote-controlled underwater vehicles (ROVs) document life on the seabed as well as the impact of our exploitation of the Earth’s resources. The ROVs can reach a depth of up to 5,000 meters where water pressure it too strong for the human body to handle. The contrast between the mysterious, quiet seabed with the machinery used to extract specimen for research is unsettling. Especially when we think that soon heavy machines for excavation might also be roaming and ruining these ecosystems.