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Short abstract:

While deep sea mining (DSM) has been promised as the solution to the transition to clean energy, many unknowns remain about deep sea environments and DSM impacts on them. This article investigates how narratives of deep sea researchers become dominated by futures wherein DSM is seen as inevitable.

Long abstract:

The fields in Ocean Science are being called on to find solutions to grand societal challenges. What happens when potential solutions to these issues create tensions with other concerns, e.g., environmental conservation? Solutions to grand societal challenges are not uniformly agreed upon and may counteract each other. One such example is deep sea mining (DSM), which promises to supply the rare earth elements necessary for the energy transition, but whose harvesting methods threaten to damage a vast, potentially climate-relevant, but understudied environment. However, particularly within the scientific communities, most narratives around DSM regard deep sea mining as inevitable choosing to focus rather on mitigation and/ or “sustainable exploitation”. Arguments around whether and how to engage fail to imagine other future outcomes (e.g., ones in which DSM is no longer inevitable). Through the case of DSM and the deep sea researchers that (dis)engage with this incipient industry, this paper will examine how researchers, called upon to be societally relevant, both navigate the tensions arising from potentially conflicting understandings of what it means to do societally and environmental relevant research and how they draw from certain, potentially contradictory, logics to produce coherent narratives around why to engaging with DSM. Using the concept of ambivalence (see Singleton & Michael, 1993), the talk will unpack their narratives to explore the presence of inevitability within them with the hope to better understand how certain imaginations of DSM futures come dominate and what this means for both deep sea research and environmental conservation.