Paul Woods
A new open-data platform is bringing transparency and accountability to the realm of deep-sea mining, says Paul Woods
The ocean is Earth’s blue lung. Covering 70 percent of the planet’s surface, it regulates the weather, cycles fresh water, absorbs carbon emissions and sustains the livelihoods of millions. In short, it is the foundation of all life as we know it. It is also the planet’s final frontier. According to scientists, more than eighty percent of our ocean is “unmapped, unobserved and unexplored.” What’s more: 91 percent of ocean species remain unclassified. The ocean is both the source of life and a realm of mystery. And yet, amid the ocean’s vast expanse, human industry is mobilizing to explore its depths and tap its seabed for metals and minerals such as cobalt, nickel, and copper.
Although deep-sea mining is still in its infancy, commercial interest in the activity is accelerating rapidly, driving a modern-day gold rush to the bottom of the ocean. Exploration licences, covering 1.5 million square kilometers in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans, have already been granted by the International Seabed Authority and exploration activities have already started in international waters. Several countries are also exploring mineral resources within their Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) and Extended Continental Shelves (ECSs), although none have begun commercial mining operations. The challenge, notes Paul Woods, chief innovation officer and co-founder of Global Fishing Watch, is that “almost everything about deep-sea mining happens far beyond public view.”
“Operations unfold hundreds of miles offshore while the real disruption occurs miles below the water’s surface, where no satellite or seabound observer can see it,” Woods explains. “In a moment when international rules remain unfinished and the stakes for marine ecosystems are enormous, the question of how to make this emerging industry transparent has become urgent.”
Enter the Deep-Sea Mining Watch portal. Originally developed in 2016 by the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory, the new Deep-Sea Mining Watch portal now harnesses Global Fishing Watch tools — from satellite imagery and vessel tracking to machine learning — bringing additional layers of insights to spotlight one of the planet’s most inaccessible arenas and bring transparency to deep-sea mining.
“In a sector defined by remoteness and sweeping environmental unknowns, we can give the public, researchers and regulators a clear view of an industry whose impacts will be felt long before they are ever seen,” says Woods.
We spoke with Paul Woods during the launch of the new Deep-Sea Mining Watch portal to learn more about how Global Fishing Watch’s cutting-edge technologies can illuminate activities of the deep-sea mining industry, transparency’s role in driving accountability and why open data may prove to be the most powerful safeguard for the planet’s last frontier.
Global Fishing Watch built its reputation by shining a light on the world’s fishing fleets. Now, you’re turning that same lens toward the deep sea — a place most of us will never see. What drew you to the idea of monitoring deep-sea mining, and how did this new frontier become the next natural step in your work?
My first foray into ocean conservation was prompted by the Deep Water Horizon oil spill in 2010. That was the first time I thought about using satellite data to monitor a global threat to the ocean in the form of oil pollution. While searching for more oil spills and mapping mountain top removal mining in my home state of West Virginia, I developed a vision for how we can help protect the ocean by making activities that are out of sight and over the horizon more visible. From there, I started tracking vessels because, as we know, they sometimes spill oil too. I quickly found myself mapping the footprint of the global fishing fleet because so much of the world’s vessel activity is driven by fisheries, especially in the high seas far from shore. More recently, with our satellites, we have started to monitor a new type of activity out there in the deep ocean, beyond the reach of national governments. This is exploration activity for future seabed mining. And just like the mountain top mining close to my home, this will disrupt huge swaths of the ocean seabed, and yet, unlike the mountains, the impacts will be almost entirely hidden.
What makes Global Fishing Watch uniquely placed to drive innovative tools such as Deep-Sea Mining Watch 2.0?
For the last decade, our team has been building a platform that is capable of mapping all human activity at sea. We have become experts in vessel tracking technology, and we now have huge quantities of satellite imaging capacity at our disposal to detect all the vessels that avoid being tracked. We have a large team of experts that can analyze all this data to determine what vessels are doing, who is operating them and who benefits financially. And we have world-class machine learning engineers who automate all this analysis so that a small distributed team can monitor the entire world in near real-time. Our ethos is openness and collaboration, and we value transparency as a core principle for effective management of our shared ocean resources. Building on this core platform, which we call the open ocean platform, we can now shine a light on any type of human activity in the ocean.
The deep ocean has been called Earth’s last wilderness. As commercial interest in it begins to accelerate, what does transparency look like in a place that has historically been so far beyond human reach?
Managing and monitoring commercial interest in the deep sea is a very challenging problem. Not only would mining activity happen several miles below the surface of the ocean, the vessels at the surface that are working on exploration and eventual exploitation are stationed hundreds of miles from the nearest shore. Few humans will ever see this part of our planet at the surface, let alone at depth. Then, there are the biodiversity implications. There are still millions of species out there that we have yet to discover and we don’t know how deep-sea mining will impact them. That’s why, for us, transparency starts with publicly tracking all vessel activity, identifying which vessels are doing what and then tracking that activity back to the people on shore who stand to benefit financially from the exploitation of our public resources. Transparency means giving everyone who has a stake in the responsible management of the seabed visibility into what is happening so they have a chance to have a voice.
Deep-Sea Mining Watch was developed in collaboration with the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory — a partnership between innovation and research, technology and science. What happens when these worlds collide? And how do you balance scientific rigor with the storytelling power of data?
When we started Global Fishing Watch, we knew that simply collecting a lot of remote sensing data and applying artificial intelligence to it was not going to change hearts or minds. In order for our data to be credible, we believe we need to put our results to the test of peer review. We are not an academic institution, but we routinely publish papers with our academic partners that break new ground, publishing our methods for others to use and revealing new insights that our open data make possible. Our very first scientific publication was a joint project with Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory director Doug McCauley called Ending Hide and Seek at Sea where we predicted that remote vessel tracking could be used to empower better ocean management and help usher in a new era of spatially ambitious marine governance and research. In this paper we envisioned a future for the Global Fishing Watch platform and predicted that with appropriate regulation, the open ocean could be sustainably managed. It is always a challenge for us to balance rapid technological innovation with the slower pace of scientific rigor and regulation. We address this challenge by working on all three at once, bringing our technical innovations to the scientific community as early as possible for validation, and working directly with governments to make sure that our outputs are suitable to support better management.
The technologies behind Global Fishing Watch — satellite data, algorithms, machine learning — are built to reveal human patterns at sea. But deep-sea mining is a smaller, quieter industry, still largely in its infancy. What did you have to rethink to make this invisible world visible?
Deep-sea mining presents a lot of challenges. First, we have an industry that is backed by strong lobbyists and powerful interests. Second, we have an activity that takes place in the middle of the ocean, far away from where people can see and monitor it. And, lastly, we know that the really messy bits of deep-sea mining — the actual strip mining of the seafloor — happens beneath several miles of water, concealed from public view. Add to all of that the fact that our current ability to monitor this from space really ends at the sea surface, and we’re faced with a problem that will require much better regulation and monitoring.
In this context, the best we can do to keep tabs on deep-sea mining activity is to infer what is happening below. We do this by harnessing remote sensing and artificial intelligence to tell us when vessels are conducting exploration efforts and when they are mining. But what we really need to do is rethink how we manage this activity collectively, including how we govern, license and provide transparency to all of the stakeholders who co-own the high seas.