world. This ferroalloy serves as a scavenger in extracting impurities in the manufacture of steel and in turn alloys with steel to make it durable and tough. When a nation can do without steel it can do without manganese. But the United States, which definitely cannot do without steel, produces no, repeat no, manganese of metallurgical quality. In 1970, the latest year for which Department of Interior figures are available for all four metals cited, the United States imported, at a cost of $66 million, 85.7 per cent of all the grades of manganese it consumed.

Nickel-a necessary alloy in the production of stainless steel. Large amounts are required for a variety of high temperature and electrical resistance alloys and smaller amounts for such items as coins and nickel cadmium batteries. In 1970 the United States imported 100 per cent of its high-grade nickel consumption, mostly from Canada, at a cost of $426.5 million.

Copper-second only to iron in the amount and variety of its uses. The United States currently, and fortunately, produces the vast bulk of its requirements. The problem here is the approaching exhaustion of high grade U.S. ores. In 1970 the United States imported 6 per cent of its primary consumption, at a cost of $71 million.

The 36,000-ton HUGHES GLOMAR EXPLORER, the most sophisticated deep ocean mining ship afloat.

Some Figures For Those Who Like To Think Big

THE HIGH SEAS, that part of the ocean that lies beyond the 200 meter curve of the continental shelf and belongs to everybody or nobody, covers 150 million square miles of the earth-an area about fifty times the size of the contiguous United States.

Experts in such matters estimate that there are 1.5 trillion tons of manganese nodules on the floor of the Pacific Ocean alone.

An efficient mining rig producing 5,000 tons a day could exhaust the manganese resources of a million square miles of ocean bottom (less than 1 per cent of the total) in 20,000 years. Ten rigs, the maximum number expected to be working in the foreseeable future, could cover the "ground" in a mere 2,000 years.

At the present rate of increase the United States will have consumed more metals between the years 1965 and 2000 than have been consumed by all mankind in all the previous years of recorded history. So it may be necessary to work that ocean claim faster than one might think.

Cobalt-most important for the manufacture of permanent magnets. Without it there would be no modern communications systems. It is also used in guided missiles, jet aircraft engines, gas turbines and high speed tool steels. Cobalt ores, for which no substitute has been found, are produced principally in Zaire, Zambia and Morocco. In 1970 the United States imported 92 per cent of its cobalt needs, at a cost of $26.5 million.

A Billion For Four

It seems fair to assume that, with the devaluation of the dollar (coming back up again, however) and the steady increases in consumption which have occurred, the cost for imports of these four metals alone may be well over a billion dollars in 1974-not a large bite of the U.S. national budget perhaps, but a sizable factor in the balance of payments.

As the energy crisis should have taught U.S. decisionmakers, the important thing is not only the cost but the fact that U.S. national security and the welfare of the American people require absolute assurance of an uninterrupted source of supply of raw materials essential to the

economy.

It is reassuring to realize, therefore, that unlimited quantities of the four minerals here singled out are available to American miners within three to four miles of cheap and efficient transportation. The location is at the bottom of the ocean, the transportation is by ship, and the three to four miles is straight down.

All four metals, together with minor or trace amounts of some 25 others, are found in the manganese nodules that strew the bottom of every ocean and even such large freshwater bodies as the Great Lakes. The average nodule is one to three inches thick. The best commercial specimens lie in great carpets on the Pacific floor in a wide band running south of Hawaii from mid-ocean to near the southern California coast.

Credit for discovery of the nodules belongs to the scientists who made the historic globe-girdling three-year oceanographic voyage of the converted British corvette HMS CHALLENGER in the 1870s. These first specimens of the world's greatest treasure were tucked away in the British Museum and for a time forgotten. About the size and color of an over-done meatball, they were easy to forget. And, since they are found at depths of 12,000 to 20,000 feet, they could not then have been reclaimed in quantity, even if they had been blue-white diamonds.

There are several theories explaining the origin of the nodules. A favorite one suggests that metallic elements in sea water form around any small nucleus, perhaps a bit of sea shell, much as the pearl in an oyster shapes itself around a grain of sand. Manganese nodules are half buried in the mud, and coverage of the bottom in the huge area of known major deposits ranges from zero to 50 per cent. A workable mine site would average 30 to 35 per cent coverage, with a concentration of about two pounds per square foot. Educated guesses place the quantity in the Pacific alone at somewhere between one and two trillion tons. The growth rate is estimated at 15 million tons a year, making the lode the only perpetually self-renewing treasure since Aladdin lost his lamp.

Mineable nodules are 35 per cent or more manganese,

Getting the nodules to the surface and into the holds of a mother ship is an awesome engineering feat. And there is no precedent in land mining operations for the problems involved in processing the raw nodules in which the recoverable minerals are distributed atom by atom throughout the ore. Some ten years of quiet but expensive experimentation by several companies and syndicates appear to have resulted in workable solutions to the engineering problems.

American companies favor some type of vacuum dredg ing, for the most part. In the continuous-path method a dredge head suspended by a conduit from the ship is swept back and forth over the mine site, sucking up nodules as it goes. Fixed-area dredging involves a collecting device, such as a sunken barge, which remains stationary until the ore lying within its sweeping radius has been collected.

The second method, a Japanese invention, employs an

endless rope to which dredging buckets are attached at intervals. The ship moves sidewise as the revolving loop of dredge buckets is dragged across the bottom, scooping up the ore. By whatever method, the prospecting phase alone can cost from $2,000 to $4,000 a day, and considerably more for full production operations.

Several carefully unpublicized methods for winnowing the metals also have been tested. All successful ones are believed to involve hydrometallurgical techniques with sufficient flexibility to accommodate the varying character of the ore.

Most authorities agree that the United States has a technological lead both in the systems developed for nodule retrieval at great depths and in the metallurgical processes for reclaiming the ores. This lead, say spokesmen for the American companies involved, is a fragile one, however, and will be lost to aggressive foreign competitors if not promptly pursued. Japanese, West German, and French interests are the most advanced competitors. Russian capabilities, as usual, are not fully known.

A dozen American companies have already shown enough interest to invest substantial research effort and seed money. There are three leaders: (1) Deepsea Ventures, a subsidiary of the Tenneco conglomerate, is believed to have invested well over $10 million in sea mining programs since a go-ahead decision in 1968-following years of earlier investigative work. The DV ship PROSPECTOR has sampied a number of potential mine sites in the Pacific and in the course of more than 30 cruises has brought back tons of nodules to the company's pilot processing plant at Gloucester Point, Va. (2) The Kennecott Copper Corporation has logged the recovery of samples from more than 3,000 Pacific sites and brought back some 250 tons for experimental processing in the company's San Diego laboratory. (3) The Summa Corporation, solely owned by billionaire Howard Hughes, has an estimated $60 million already invested and another $200 million committed to a system designed to sweep up 5,000 tons of nodules a day. The company is ready to commence operations with the 36,000-ton HUGHES GLOMAR EXPLORER, built to order by the Sun Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Co. The sophisticated Hughes system includes a 324-foot submersible barge designed to carry a huge dredge head to the ocean bottom to scoop up nodules and send them by compressed air up a 16-inch pipe to the ship. Nothing is known of the company's processing facilities.

Leigh S. Ratiner, Director for Ocean Resources, Department of the Interior, makes some assumptions and predictions which indicate the important role ocean mining can be expected to play in the metals market.

Taking 1975 as a target year, he assumes that mineral content of the nodules is approximately as estimated in the above (industry) figures, that there would be two companies processing three million tons per year and one company processing one million tons per year. He further assumes that all would be extracting close to 100 per cent of the reclaimable metals. Nickel production, which he

One of the most dependable methods of sampling surface deposits is the dredge. Here, a wire dredge basket dumps a load of nodules on the deck of R/V PROSPECTOR. (Photo by B. J. Nixon, Deepsea Ventures, Inc.)

Long Time No Sea

THERE are, according to the U.S. State Department, 148 sovereign states in the world-as this is written. Twentynine of these are completely landlocked-Afghanistan, Andorra, Bhutan, Bolivia, Botswana, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Laos, Lesotho, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malawi, Mali, Mongolia, Nepal, Niger, Paraguay, Rwanda, San Marino, Swaziland, Switzerland, Uganda, Upper Volta, Vatican City, Zambia.

Not all of these, it is evident, are small countries. Liechtenstein is smaller than some Texas ranches but Zambia is bigger than the entire state and Bolivia is half again as big. Twenty-two other countries are "shelf locked." That is, they have no continental shelf area with its attendant mineral rights, or they front a nearly enclosed bay with only a narrow strip of shelf beyond.