Marine mining

Marine mining

The process of recovering mineral wealth from sea water and from deposits on and under the sea floor. While mineral resources to the value of trillions of dollars do exist in and under the oceans, their exploitation is not simple. Many environmental problems must be overcome and many technical advances must be made before the majority of these deposits can be mined in competition with existing land resources.

The mineral resources of the marine environment are of three basic types: the dissolved minerals of the ocean waters; the unconsolidated mineral deposits of marine beaches, continental shelf, and deep-sea floor; and the consolidated deposits contained within the bedrock underlying the seas. As with land deposits, the initial stages preceding the production of a marketable commodity include discovery, characterization of the deposit to assess its value and exploitability, and mining, including beneficiation of the material to a salable product.