The Tropic seamount, whose guardianship Spain claims because it is to the south of the Canary Islands, houses enormous reserves of essential metals in high technology and renewable energy. Located 500 kilometers (269 nautical miles) from the port of La Restinga (El Hierro), the southern limit of the Canary Islands, Tropic is an ancient volcano that rises on the bed of the Atlantic from depths of 4,200 meters to just under 1,000 meters per under the ocean and whose existence has been known for a long time. This July it has been known that BMW will buy all the cobalt necessary for the next five years in a Moroccan mine. The Canary Islands, for their part, are a world-class power for this sector in Spain.
In 2016, a British scientific expedition discovered that the ferromanganese crusts that cover its slopes have tellurium concentrations almost unprecedented in any other deposit on the planet. And not only tellurium, but also cobalt and other elements classified as strategic by the European Commission itself. Environmentalists do not want it to be exploited commercially.
If the calculations of the team that explored Tropic from the James Cook ship are correct, in that mountain there is enough cobalt to build 277 million electric cars (54 times the current world fleet of those vehicles) and enough tellurium to manufacture solar panels that would cover for alone half of the electricity consumption of the United Kingdom, the seventh economic power on the planet.
But it remains to be seen whether one day this mineral wealth can be exploited, not only because of the technical difficulties that underwater mining still entails, but also because of the legal mess that surrounds Mount Tropic. Geologically, Tropic is one of dozens of mountains in the so-called ‘Underwater Province of the Canary Islands’ and the United Nations has had a request from Spain on the table for five years to assume its ownership, expanding the continental shelf of the archipelago from the current 200 miles up to 300. However, the claim made by Spain to that area of the Atlantic overlaps in Mount Tropic with what could also be made by the Sahara administered by Morocco.
Beyond the conflict of political and legal interests, international scientific teams are beginning to publish papers that warn that in Tropic there is more than just raw materials for a dreamed-of green technological revolution, there are very valuable ecosystems, relatively scarce and with a state of conservation ” pristine”.
This is the thesis defended in the journal ‘Frontiers in Marine Sciences’ by fourteen researchers from the Universities of Edinburgh (United Kingdom), Azores and Porto (Portugal), Bergen (Norway), the Sorbonne (France) and Nova Southeastern (USA). as well as the National Oceanography Center (NOC) of the United Kingdom. And among them is the scientific director of the mission that discovered the tellurium deposit, Bramley Murton, of the NOC’s MarineE-Tech program.
This group of scientists, headed by Berta Ramiro Sánchez, from the Edinburgh School of Geosciences, maintains that this seamount, still located in international waters, should be protected under the figure of an Ecologically and Biologically Significant Area, because it is home to “numerous vulnerable marine ecosystems”. . Specifically, they detail that the video images taken by the robots of the expedition that discovered tellurium show that Tropic is covered by corals of fifteen species and sponges known as hexactinellids (Poliopogon amadou) also documented in some seabeds of the Canary Islands, of Azores or Brazil, but here they have “unique” densities and characteristics
These images, they add, also show deep-sea squid eggs, which suggest that it is a breeding area for this species, as well as coral gardens comparable to those that have been documented in other Canary Islands seamounts such as the Banco de la Concepción (northeast of Lanzarote) or El Hierro Ridge.
“Tropic is home to diverse and almost pristine benthic communities, including various vulnerable marine ecosystems” -they underline- which have grown thanks to the privileged nutrient conditions provided by the upwelling of deep waters in North Africa and the contribution of minerals from the calimas of the Sahara.
And above all, they stress, these are ecosystems made up of extremely slow-growing species, highly vulnerable to human impacts such as trawling or deep-sea mining. And they were hardly going to withstand the impact of having its precious 20-centimeter crust ripped off that seamount to extract the ‘high-tech’ minerals from it.
Ecologists in Action has denounced that underwater mining “threatens” the ocean floors of the Canary Islands and has recommended that a moratorium on this activity be issued to protect the mountains located under the sea. The environmental federation has published ‘Ojos que no ven…submarine mining in Spain’, a report in which it exposes the impacts that this mining activity can have on marine biodiversity as well as the threats to which Spanish waters are exposed.
The environmental organization points out that 2020 is a key year, as the International Seabed Authority plans to launch the code that will regulate the extraction of minerals on the high seas. Ecologists indicate that what is known about underwater mining is that it will have “enormous effects” on marine biodiversity in a very little-known environment, “could affect the entire food chain and even threaten fishing productivity.”
“The destruction or extinction of species, caused by underwater mining, could also prevent the discovery of new medicines, associated with life forms from the ocean depths. Without going any further, the covid-19 test was developed using an enzyme isolated from a microbe found in deep-sea hydrothermal vents, a very scarce habitat and now under threat from mining,” the report states.
In the case of the Canary Islands, Ecologistas en Acción indicates that, for years, various projects by Spanish public bodies have led investigations to assess the mining potential of areas close to the islands, specifically, in the so-called “Grandmothers of the Canary Islands”, they are a set of more than 100 seamounts of volcanic origin located mainly southwest of El Hierro and northwest of Lanzarote and at depths between 100 and 4,400 meters.
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