Gold explorer starts deep-sea prospecting

A London-listed mining exploration company is taking the first step towards extracting potentially billions of dollars of gold, zinc and copper from the seabed in New Zealand waters.

Seabed mining explorer and developer Neptune Minerals will start taking cores from deposits of gold, zinc and copper in waters northeast from White Island along the Kermadec Arc at the end of this month. Contractor Seacore, a specialist in marine drilling, will undertake the actual core sampling of the sulphide deposits, using a drill rig mounted on a work vessel .

Mineral samples dredged up by New Zealand researchers along the Kermadec Arc in 1996 were found to contain 18 per cent zinc (by weight), 15 per cent copper, and six parts per million of gold - a higher concentration than some on-shore gold deposits.

The initial finds were at the Brothers volcano, which is three times the size of White Island and lies in 1850m of water.

Since then, the researchers have explored many of the 75 seafloor volcanoes along the arc and found many of them have hydrothermal vents belching super-hot water with so much dissolved mineral content that they are called "black smokers".

New Zealand, with the Continental Shelf Act, is one of the few nations to have legislation in place for seabed prospecting and Neptune is thought to be paying about $2.25 a sq km annual rental for its prospecting licence.

New Zealand is preparing to go to the United Nations next year to lodge a claim to a continental shelf boundary 50 per cent bigger than the present 4 million sq km of exclusive economic zone (EEZ).

The claim will cover rights to seafloor minerals on another 2 million sq km of continental shelf outside the EEZ - in some areas stretching 563km from shore - and open up hundreds of billions of dollars worth of mineral and other resources.

Claim content

* New Zealand is one of a few nations to have legislation in place for seabed prospecting.

* It is preparing to go to the UN next year to lodge a claim to a continental shelf boundary 50 per cent bigger than the present 4 million sq km of exclusive economic zone.

* The claim will cover rights to seafloor minerals on another 2 million sq km of continental shelf outside the zone.

* This could open up the possibility of benefiting from hundreds of billions of dollars worth of mineral and other resources.

- NZPA