Posted on 10/08/2010 6:25:52 AM PDT by decimon
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The minerals, including sulfur, copper, zinc, iron and precious metals, are contained in volcanogenic massive sulfide (VMS) deposits that form on the ocean floor where tectonic plates pull apart and allow magma (molten rock) to invade the Earth's 3.7-mile- (6 kilometer-) thick crust. The magma heats seawater to 662 degrees Fahrenheit (350 degrees Celsius) and moves it through the ocean crust via convection; and the seawater deposits the minerals where it discharges along the ridge axis.
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(Excerpt) Read more at nextbigfuture.com ...
Mineralium tremens ping.
The Chinese will now claim the floor of the oceans as theirs.
Nautilus Minerals has obtained a lare concession off the coast of New Guinea and will begin mining gold and copper from the sea in 2011. This is a very expensive proposition to get started, but I believe that thus far the Chinese have been excluded.
That’s why Howard built the “Glomar Explorer”...not really.
Including Sarah Palin.
This is why the idea of asteroid mining is so abjectly silly. There’s no dilithium or Naquita or unobtanium you can only get from asteroids that you can’t get from earth, and as incredibly expensive as ocean floor mining may be, it’s trivial compared to asteroid mining.
Yep. They were claiming this back when I was in junior high school in 1966. Might as well be on the moon though, given the cost to lift them to the surface and ship them to shore. Too bad we’ve never been able to get that teleporter thingy from “The Fly” to work right; that sure would solve a lot of problems.
MAGMA!
What a cool word. MAGMA!
Just fun to say:)
"Even after they pay with money I'm still gonna melt every city on the planet with liquid hot MAGMA."
Doesn’t the writer know that poor Mother Earth can’t compensate for the bad, wasteful humans that drive SUVs and fly in jet planes. Now only do they use up the natural resources they are destroying Ghia by roasting her with climatic warming.
Unless the Mineral rights are controlled by the UN. Then Asteroid mining might start to make sense.
The cover story was that he was after manganese nodules on the sea floor. It was pretty effective cover. I remember as a child having a Time/Life book that had all kinds of artist's conceptions of how the Glomar Explorer was going to vacuum up the nodules. I wonder how Time felt about being used as cover to steal a Soviet sub.
Some of the nickel-iron asteroids can almost be smelted to stainless steel because the purity is so high.
The best thing about asteroids is that nobody owns them. Its the New World without the pesky natives.
The problems Earth-side are political. Unstable governments, corrupt UN, environazis, etc.
Thanks decimon! And not even minerals — the gas hydrates and clathrates would supply our hydrocarbon needs for thousands of years. I read about a known deposit off North Carolina that was equal to the entire natural gas use for the US for one year.
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