Rapid Reconnaissance Sampling of Hard Mineral Deposits on the Seabed

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The resource potential of deep-water marine minerals has been brought into focus with the establishment of 200-mile offshore Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) by the world's coastal and island nations. A variety of programs is currently underway in the United States and several other nations for evaluating the potential deep seabed mineral resources that exist within national jurisdictions. Collection of outcrop samples from consolidated seabed mineral deposits is essential for deposit characterization but is a tedious and inaccurate process with presently available technology. Dredging, which is still the only common method, is notoriously imprecise and biased toward collection of protruding and loose rocks rather than representative in-place material. The project proposed here has the potential to replace dredging for reconnaissance surveys of hard seabed mineral deposits with a precise, rapid and unbiased method based upon an untethered free-fall sampler.