The island of Aitutaki is an authentic paradise to snorkel: if you are lucky you can even spot humpback whales that come every year from the Antarctic to reproduce.
The Cook archipelago includes 15 islands, among which the beautiful
Aitutaki. Here they have a severe law
which enables only local inhabitants to fish.
This law was issued in 2017 and holds true for the first fifty nautical
miles from the coast ( so as to ward off big fishing boats ) creating a
protected zone called ‘’Marae moana ‘’, which means ‘’sacred ocean’’ in Maori .
The problem is that these waters hide
something far more valuable than
fish: they are called ‘’manganese nodules‘’ and they are so valuable because
they contain cobalt,nickel , copper and tracks of rare earths. To date these
medals are more and more demanded for the production of batteries for
smartphones, tablets and electric cars but also for wind farms and solar panels.
Last year in June the Cook
islands announced the inception of a project to spot these nodules deposited
six thousand meters beneath the sea. The extraction of these nodules, not only
by the Cook islands, could replace the mainland extraction cutting out all the
problems due to human rights, for example. However the project represents a
menace for the organisms dwelling on the
ocean floor. This crucial problem remains unsolved because,
if we want to use a very famous statement, ‘’
we know less about the ocean floor than about the lunar surface ‘’ and we
know even less about the bizarre and fragile organisms that live there.
The extractions will certainly lift sediments that transported by submarine
currents would literally bury alive sea cucumbers, corals and other organisms
that feed themselves filtering microorganism contained in the water, and we
have no idea about the range of diffusion of the sediments. Furthermore, the
machineries would extract year after year the first 10-15 centimeters of
the ocean floor in an area of about one hundred square kilometers and, since manganese
nodules grow slowly (10-20 millimeters in a million years ), the ecosystem will hardly survive to such an
intervention.
Some companies are planning to use on the ocean floor a vehicle
connected to the ship on the surface with a sort of umbilical cord . On the
ship a machine will pump the materials upward, then dump into the sea unwanted sediments. The
extraction could only comport vibrations and light pollution in areas that are
usually pitch dark. This would cause problems to whales, fish and other
creatures that use echolocation or that produce by themselves the light to lure
prey. Then, another problem is that
residual toxic metals could enter the food chain .
Manganese nodules aren’t exclusive goods of the Cook islands’ territory.
For example, in the North of the
archipelago, we find the ‘’fracture of Clipperton ‘’, which is a fracture that
seemed rich in nodules and it extends from the Hawaiis to Mexico, thus on such
a vast scale, it would be impossible to verify
the actions of companies from all over
the world, and it would also be impossible to safeguard the environment.
To date this question is at a
deadpoint: we know too little to give permission to this unscrupulous companies to proceed (except for different
studies and surveys carried out in order to know the ocean floor better) and
businessmen are anxiously waiting ‘’the green light‘’ to wreck the ocean more
than they have already done .
In conclusion I can only hope with you that this ‘’green light ‘’ will
remain forever a ‘’ red light‘’, as it is today .
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