Canadian-owned Nautilus Minerals received more criticism in its bid to mine the sea-floor offshore Papua New Guinea, Radio New Zealand reported.
Nautilus is developing the world’s first commercial deep sea mining project in Papua New Guinea called Solwara 1.
But the Deep Sea Mining campaign says there’s been a lack of environmental analysis for the project.
Dr. Helen Rosenbaum, the author of the report ’Out of Our Depth: Mining the Ocean Floor in Papua New Guinea’ stressed that very little is understood about the possible impacts of Solwara project.
Dr. Rosenbaum said: “They say they’ve continued to do research that addressed a lot of the concerns that we addressed in that report. But every time we’ve gone back to them to say, well can you share this research with us, we’ve been unsuccessful. So we’re totally unconvinced that this research has been conducted.”
Dr Helen Rosenbaum states the campaign’s worries are similar for the many projects in which deep sea mining exploration is starting throughout the Pacific.
[mappress] Subsea World News Staff , June 12, 2012; Image: Nautilus Minerals