FOR decades, mining companies eyed with interest the fist-sized lumps of mineral littering the floor of the world’s deep oceans. Made largely of manganese dioxide and other oxides, these mysterious nodules harbour valuable metals like copper, nickel and cobalt.
The cost of mining on the seabed at least 4 kilometres down makes the prospect unattractive to most companies, but a bacterium that inhabits the nodules in the Indian Ocean could improve the economics of deep-sea mining by making extraction cheaper. Scientists from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore have used the bacterium to extract metals from the nodules at…
