Battle for the bottom of the sea

A black smoker belches minerals, gases and seawater. Picture / GNS

Along the Kermadec arc, stretching from the Bay of Plenty to Tonga, lurks a chain of undersea volcanoes - submerged cousins of Ruapehu and White Island - many with hot springs. Some of these vents belch out a mix of minerals, gases and seawater at up to 300C and are known as black smokers.

The mixing of hot, acidic, mineral-laden hydrothermal fluids with ice-cold seawater causes a chemical reaction and the minerals precipitate out, forming dark, dense clouds of smoke.

Increasingly, scientists believe hydrothermal vents are where life may have begun.

New Zealand and American scientists exploring this desert landscape from mini-subs in April and May found the vents were oases of life. In these sulphur-rich environments, "extremophile" bacteria somehow survive, adapted to hot and cold temperatures, high pressure and producing energy by chemical reaction. The scientists saw dozens of new marine species, including long-necked barnacles, giant mussels and specially adapted crabs.

When the vents are spent, the food supply is cut off and the bacteria and species they support disappear. Slowly, deepwater corals form and provide habitats for larval stages of fish - an entirely new ecosystem develops.

When Alex Malahoff dived on one volcano he came eyeball to eyeball for the first time with an orange roughy - feeding on the bottom at 800m, the limits of its endurance.

"It's important that we understand the relationships," says Malahoff, chief executive of the Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences.

"How do we get from a worm that lives on a hydrothermal vent - essentially the origins of life - to the orange roughy?

"We're just at the beginning in our understanding."

Within this wondrous new frontier for scientific discovery, Neptune Minerals will shortly begin drilling for samples of deposits thought to be rich in base metals - copper, lead and zinc - as well as gold and silver.

Neptune is an Australian-owned mineral exploration company listed on the alternative sharemarket in London. It is paying the Government about $2.25 a sq km in annual rental for a prospecting licence covering 7800 sq km, including the Brothers and Healy volcanoes. It has applications for further prospecting covering 60,000 sq km.

If Neptune strikes gold - in the form of economically viable concentrations of these minerals - it could eventually begin extracting sulphide deposits currently fetching between US$400 and $1000 ($583 to $1458) a tonne.

"If you took a million tonnes, that's a significant amount of money," says managing director Simon McDonald, a geologist with a background in minerals and petroleum exploration.

The Government would receive a 1 per cent royalty. But what might we lose in the process?

The looming conflict between economic and ecological values in our seas is why we need an oceans policy, says Malahoff.

What's an oceans policy? It has been described as an RMA for the seas - a way to ensure sustainable management of ocean resources so that ecologically prized features are preserved and human impacts minimised. It's billed as overarching legislation - embracing, and plugging gaps in, more than a dozen laws affecting marine activities.

It's about much more than mining - potentially ensnaring everything from the runoff on high country farms through urban stormwater pollution and coastal development to fisheries management, offshore wind farms and international shipping and pipelines.

Detractors see it as a bureaucratic giant squid, with a control-freak Government extending tentacles to an area already subject to international laws (apart from being a law unto itself).

WHOLE forests had already been expended on oceans policy paperwork and consultation when work was suspended in mid-2003, after the foreshore and seabed dispute arose.

With the Crown's ownership decreed, the Government is preparing for re-launch, tasking Environment Minister David Benson-Pope with leading policy development. A discussion paper will be released in the New Year.

In Auckland this month, the two-day Seachange 05 conference organised by the Environmental Defence Society aims to focus debate on what's needed.

EDS senior policy analyst Raewyn Peart says oceans policy is a chance for New Zealand to take the lead in oceans governance.

"We have been groundbreaking in some areas, such as the quota management system - we need to build on that," she says.

Reminders of the need for an oceans policy are all around. Invasions of sea squirt and undaria seaweed point to weaknesses in marine biosecurity.

The spread of mangroves in estuaries is linked to sedimentation caused by urban and coastal development.

Between $4 billion and $11 billion needs to be spent over 20 years to improve Auckland's beaches and waterways - far more than is budgeted.

Overfishing of commercial species hoki and orange roughy have forced cuts in the allowable quota.

Commercial scallop fishing was closed this week in Queen Charlotte Sound after allegations of illegal scalloping in protected Long Island Reserve.

The fast-growing marine farming industry is still grappling with new legislation and uncertainty over acceptable areas for expansion.

There is international scientific and environmentalist pressure to ban bottom trawling, particularly on biodiversity-rich seamounts (submerged inactive volcanoes and rises), and to introduce more "no take" marine reserves and marine protected areas.

Then there's the lure of potential new economic uses. New Zealand is one of the few nations to have legislation allowing seabed prospecting within its 200 mile (322km) exclusive economic zone.

It is planned to lodge a claim with the UN next year to increase our jurisdiction even further to the continental shelf boundary - in some places 563km from shore - giving us control over the rights to hundreds and billions of dollars worth of mineral and other resources.

The prospect of large-scale extraction horrifies environmentalists and many scientists, who argue we are selling our resources too cheaply - and without knowing what we might be losing in biodiversity.

Other economic uses loom, ranging from offshore wind farms and tidal energy to pharmaceutical and industrial uses for marine organisms as humble as the sponge.

But few procedures are in place for assessing the environmental effects of exploitation beyond the 12-mile limit, says the Ministry for the Environment.

There's also doubt whether environmental provisions in the Continental Shelf Act and the Exclusive Economic Zone Act would stand up to legal challenge.

Right now, it's like the Wild West out there, says Peart, whose book Looking Out to Sea - NZ as a model for oceans governance was launched this week ahead of the conference.

Though a raft of laws cover the use of the seas, each is purpose-specific, she writes. And many rules and regulations - or their enforcement - are falling short.

Management of land-based activities under the RMA has been weak in addressing sedimentation and water pollution. Fisheries management has only recently begun to grapple with environmental impacts.

"The impacts of selective removal of a target species can cascade through the entire marine ecosystem," writes Peart.

In coastal areas where fish and crayfish have been extensively fished, kina - their major prey - have flourished. This has led to a decrease in the kelp they feed on.

"The full extent and significance of these broader ecosystem impacts of fishing activity are largely unknown," writes Peart.

It's gaps in legislation and in the knowledge of what's out there that an oceans policy is expected to address.

But there's work to do to get everyone back on board. It wasn't just the foreshore and seabed dispute which caused policy work to stall in 2003, insiders say. Some say the Greens were too pushy; others that the conflict between economic and ecological values led to impasses between Government departments.

Ad hoc policy development since - on marine reserves, marine protected areas, aquaculture and the foreshore and seabed - has generated cynicism about what an oceans policy can add.

Recreational Fishing Council president Keith Ingram says: "When it was first mooted we thought it was going to have some teeth to it and be a good basis for all the other marine-related issues to dovetail into.

"Unfortunately oceans policy appears to be a talkfest with no real commitment or leadership by Government. It's really trying to close the stable door after the horse has bolted."

NIWA chief executive Rick Pridmore says the policy need not be about restriction and might lead to more scientific research.

"We own something way bigger than our land mass but there's great ignorance about it. It's ours - we own it and the mineral rights to it.

"When you own the fourth largest economic zone in the world you want to know what's there. You can't protect what you don't know is there and you can't make money from what you don't know is there."

Thousands of our marine species have yet to be described. The Government's Ocean Survey 20/20 strategy, launched in March, aims to build a comprehensive picture of oceanic resources and ecosystems over the next 15 years.

But research funding remains tight, and experts in taxonomy (classifying new species) are as rare as the biota being discovered.

It is location which makes New Zealand's 4.2 million sq km of ocean the envy of the planet. Sitting astride two colliding tectonic plates, spectacular underwater features include chains of underwater volcanoes and deep ocean trenches and ridges, writes Peart.

The convergence of cold, high-nutrient Antarctic and warmer subtropical water masses promotes great diversity and highly productive areas such as the Chatham rise.

Around 800 seamounts have been identified, supporting diverse endemic species.

Almost 80 per cent of seamounts between 500m and 1000m are now fished; a study of the impacts of bottom trawling on eight found "substantial impact" on benthic fauna. Only 19 are closed, temporarily.

"The exploitation of such features for commercial fisheries has proceeded well ahead of scientific research ... with the result that species yet unknown to science may have already been lost," Peart writes.

But Niwa's Pridmore says there is no need for panic. He's relaxed about mineral exploration on the Kermadec arc by Neptune, the first to gain a prospecting licence in our territorial waters.

"No one really knows what the resource is or its economic potential - it may come to nothing. If you want speculators to come in, it has to be priced accordingly.

"We're not at the chronic stage where we have to fix something [quickly]."

It's vital that we learn more about what's out there and what's worth protecting before introducing new laws, he says.

"We do know a lot about the ocean - that's not to say we know everything. But for the last 10-15 years we've learned an immense amount."

Pridmore likes the idea of a policy being formulated when issues are beginning to escalate, but our fisheries aren't collapsing around us.

"Some of our core uses are quite well protected. We have some mineral policies, fisheries policies, law of the sea policies - New Zealand isn't going to lose anything substantial with these policies.

"What we need to work on now is the transition between oceans and the coast and a whole-ecosystem approach to the ocean.

"And biosecurity policy needs to be developed in the next five years before some really major issues emerge. Policy formulation now is the right time."

Seachange 05: Managing our coastal waters and oceans runs Nov 21-22 at the Heritage Hotel, Auckland.

www.seachange05.com