Writing About Deep-sea mining (and other things)
by A Connors
Did you know that if you look at the Earth from directly over the Pacific, you hardly see any land. It’s pretty much all water.
We live on an ocean planet.
One of the marine biologists I spoke to while researching my book, The Girl Who Broke The Sea, had a nice way of putting it. He said:
If aliens ever visit Earth, they probably won’t even bother looking at the sticky up bits of rock on the back.
But, land-dwelling, fruit-eating mammals that we are, we tend not to think about it like that. We tend not to think about the deep-sea very much at all.
I didn’t set out to write a novel about deep-sea mining. Like all good stories, I started with my main character: Lily Fawcett. I wanted to write a book about someone who feels like an outsider, someone for whom social interaction doesn’t come easily. I was a pretty socially awkward child at school, so it felt like something I could do a decent job of writing about, and it felt like something teen and YA readers would recognize and relate to.
I hit on the idea of sending Lily to a deep-sea mining rig somewhat at random. One of my friends drives ROVs (Remotely Operated Vehicles, think: radio-controlled mini-subs) and it just seemed like the perfect setting to force some change out of my character. Cramped, smelly, stuffy, noisy. Everything I knew she would hate.
But I wasn’t married to the setting at first. I have a scientific background, so the technical challenges of the deep-sea appealed to me. But apart from that, I’d never really thought about the deep-sea much at all. The only good movie set in the deep-sea I could think of was The Abyss from 1989, which is in stark contrast to the seventy plus movies alone set on space-stations over roughly the same period.
There’s something important here. Why is space so deeply woven into our culture in a way that the deep-sea is not? Both settings provide ample opportunities for dramatic tension. Unless you insert aliens into the mix, space is pretty sterile and uninteresting compared with the two-million-plus species that inhabit our oceans.
The marine biologists I spoke to as part of my research are actually kind of bitter about this. They have two theories. First, that the space-race of the 1950s (driven by the emerging threat of intercontinental ballistic missiles) still casts a long shadow over our collective consciousness. Second, simply that we are air-breathing mammals and our anthropocentric bias is baked so deeply into our psyche that we are hardly aware of it. The sight of a rolling field, a snow-capped mountain, or even the Earth from space, stirs something primal inside us. But when we try to imagine the vast depths of the deep ocean, our imagination – and our empathy – dries up (no pun intended).
It’s a problem with very real, practical consequences. NASA, for example, receives around four-times the research funding from the US government than NOAA receives. And almost more importantly: how many of us have heard of NASA but haven’t heard of NOAA?
It all changed for me when I started researching my book. I began with a few casual Google searches. I was mostly focused on the story, but I wanted the technology to be close enough to reality that it would feel plausible, and I wanted to get the language right, since I love the unique jargon that comes with each scientific field, and I think it’s an important part of making a story come to life.
Every time I learned something new about the deep-sea, however, it became more and more interesting. The richness of the ecosystem, the newness of the science, and the breadth of my own naivety revealed themselves ever more clearly.
From Google searches, I moved onto reading scientific papers. From scientific papers, I started to email the most frequently cited researchers and beg for some of their time.
Marine biologists and oceanographers, I should say, are the coolest scientists I’ve ever met. Think: half-scientist, half-sailor. Think: lab coats and tattoos. I say this humbly as a former particle physicist: they are far cooler than us.
I learned, with their help, that the abyssal plains – vast undersea flatlands, hidden deserts, 5km under the ocean – account for about 50% of the earth’s surface, but that their systematic exploration has only become possible in the past ten or fifteen years, thanks mostly to the development of new battery and materials technology. I learned that we’ve mapped only about 20% of the ocean floor to modern standards. And that we’ve observed and catalogued only around 1% of the species we believe inhabit the world’s oceans.
As one marine biologist put it:
Our exploration of the deep ocean is so nascent that we discover something entirely new to science every time we look.
I also learned that there is around $200 trillion worth of metal lying loose on the ocean floor in the abyssal plains, and the mining companies really, really want to dig it up.
This was an interesting moment in the process of writing my book. I was about halfway through, the story was starting to come together, but suddenly I wasn’t just world-building anymore. I’d blundered into an incredibly important, controversial and much overlooked topic.
Not many people know, for example, that about a million square kilometres of the abyssal plains are already licenced for exploratory mining to around sixteen different companies. Or that the so-called “two year rule”, which obliges the International Seabed Authority to set out the regulations under which commercial deep-sea mining can begin, expires this July.
The arguments against deep-sea mining are pretty clear. Collecting polymetallic nodules (the type of deep-sea mining I cover in my book) involves driving a combine harvester-like vehicle across the ocean floor, ploughing 5m wide by 10cm deep tracks through the last untouched habitat on the planet. By some estimates, in order to recoup their investment, an average mining company would need to strip around 500 square kilometres of ocean floor every year. And the silt plumes generated by the process, and the noise of pumping the nodules to the surface, would extend hundreds of kilometres beyond that, affecting marine life in ways we are not even close to fully understanding.
But the arguments in favour are not without merit. If we are serious about decarbonising our economy (and we have to be, because we can’t ignore climate change) then by some estimates, we’re going to need more metals in the next ten years (to build batteries and generators) than we’ve used in the entire history of humanity up to this point. The circular economy (recycling) will not meet demand. And surface-based mining is not without its own social and environmental impacts.
As a new writer, who had not yet even sold my first book, I had no idea how I could do justice to such a ferociously complex topic, in which science, industry, and international law were locked in a global three-way tussle.
I didn’t want to write in a way that felt like I was condoning a process that has the potential to wipe out entire ecosystems before we know they ever existed. But I also believe that fiction owes readers more than a dystopian cautionary tale and a saccharine “don’t do it” message. Addressing climate change is taking all the ingenuity, passion and energy we have, it is an active endeavour, and it requires difficult compromises. Fiction should help us navigate that reality.
The scientific community is pretty aligned on the subject of deep-sea mining. Whilst it might one day be a net positive, right now the consensus is that big-money and politics are trying to strong-arm science. Over 700 marine science and policy experts have signed an open statement calling for a moratorium on commercial mining. They suggest that ten years (aligning with the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science) is the right timescale.
My book is set after this moratorium, in a world where our scientific understanding and our technology has moved forward enough so that deep-sea mining can happen in a highly limited (and less destructive) way, under the watchful gaze of a resident science team. And even so, the on-going tension between industry and science is a major component of the story.
But what role does fiction really play? Fiction is not journalism. In telling a story about deep-sea mining, it’s easy to talk about raising awareness and alerting people to an overlooked environmental threat, but I think fiction needs to offer more than that.
The real power of fiction is its ability to trigger an emotional response in the reader. By creating sequences of events that play out internal conflicts, by constructing cycles of tension and release, novels engage readers at a much deeper psychological level than other forms. As Stephen King once wrote: Writing is telepathy.
The danger is that in trying to engage the reader and send them on an emotional journey, it’s easy to pick the wrong antagonist. I didn’t want to send Lily to the bottom of the ocean and have her do battle with a yellow-eyed leviathan, or defeat a creature with tentacles that were just begging to be lopped off. Doing so might have raised awareness, but it would have reinforced the stereotype of the deep-sea as a threatening, hostile, alien world, a reservoir of our deepest psychological fears, and a place completely separate and disconnected from human activity.
The deep-sea needs more of our empathy, not more of our fear.
I knew Lily would have to find something new to science at the bottom of the ocean. I didn’t want it to be a monster to be defeated, or even a completely benign entity in need of saving. By making Lily encounter something that is both a threat, and threatened, just as she is, and by making her journey primarily one of self-acceptance, I hoped to emphasise the similarities rather than the differences between us and the deep-sea.
This is my favourite line from the book:
It wasn’t human, but it had human traits. It could want, and need, and suffer. What did it understand of me? Probably no more than I understood of it. But it wanted to understand! That was the most human thing of all.
Books are important because they have a way of directing our attention (both as readers and writers) towards the things that really matter in the world, the things that are nourishing, and worthy of our attention. But more than that, by engaging readers at such a fundamental level, books have the ability to change how we think — maybe not all at once, but incrementally, in aggregate, over a period of many books, each one building on the last and influencing the next.
As fiction writers, we have an incredible opportunity to bring about change by dramatising new connections and parallels, by inciting empathy where it might not have naturally existed before.
In writing a book in which the deep-sea is a place of emotional discovery and connection, rather than a place filled with monsters to be defeated, I hope I’ve moved the needle in the right direction as far as the deep-sea is concerned at least.
—
Adam’s first novel, The Girl Who Broke The Sea, is published by Scholastic and available in all good bookshops.
If you’re interested in learning more about the deep-sea, the Deep-Sea Podcast is absolutely the very best place to start.
A Connors is a former physicist and former child who likes writing stories and building unlikely, poorly thought through gadgets with his sons. He started his career as a physicist, building part of the Large Hadron Collider in CERN. He has also sold encyclopaedias in Chicago, worked for an investment bank, taught physics in Sudan, fitted emergency Wi-Fi in the refugee camps in Greece, and now works as an engineering manager in the Google Research team. He lives in Hertfordshire with his partner, two sons, and a dog named Rosie.
Solutions Spotlight
In this week’s extract from a novel including a climate solution, here is an extract from ‘No More Fairy Tales: Stories to Save Our Planet’. This is an anthology of 24 short stories, each with climate solutions at their heart. This has an associated website showing how to make each solution a reality.
This extract is from ‘Climate Gamers’ by D.A. Baden, Martin Hastie, and Steve Willis. This is about a gaming competition to develop scenarios that keep Earth under =1.5 degrees.
High-scoring team members, or rather their gaming identities, became celebrities. Devlin, or DevNoobCrusher69 as he was publicly known, was too canny to allow himself to get distracted as several others did by playing up to their personas. Still, he couldn’t resist a bit of trash talk with his arch nemesis, DrGetRekt, a gamer on another team he knew from his days playing Civilisation.
The game fuelled fierce debates between proponents of green growth who maintained economic growth was necessary to fund innovation into carbon capture solutions and those who were adamant that planned degrowth with reductions in consumption was the only way. However, the de-growthers failed to get political support and the green-growthers failed to achieve growth without stalling progress on greenhouse gas reduction. Dev’s team gained ground when they changed the metric of political success from the GDP to a Happy Planet Index, allowing degrowth policies to look good on the new metric.
His team were now tantalisingly close to a predicted 1.5, but they were up against the elite and, despite their best efforts, were languishing in fourth. The problem was copycats. Copying didn’t always pay off as it depended what strategies were already in place, but DrGetRekt had amplified the impacts of switching to a Happy Planet Index by pouring money into artworks and culture so that each city had a giant construction showing performance on the index. Prizes were offered for the most engaging way of portraying the figures. Progress was reported in news programmes and school assemblies, harnessing the will of the people towards a common goal. The public had renamed DrGetRekt ‘the Culture Secretary’ as this simple policy had shot them into first place.