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Ahh, the glorious West Coast. Beautiful sunsets, neverending beaches, peaceful fishing villages, and perhaps soon, giant remote-controlled crawling machines churning up the ocean in search of diamonds, heavy minerals and metals.

One of those things doesn’t fit – unless Trans Hex gets to mine 321 square kilometres along a huge 80km swath of the West Coast.

The mining company has applied for a marine diamond mining right offshore of two eco-sensitive areas and a ‘multi-commodity prospecting right in multiple concessions’, which basically means that they want to go prospecting for minerals along a third of the entire western seaboard of the Western Cape.

This means that one mining company probably intends to own the right to mine for diamonds, heavy minerals and metals (including gemstones, rare earth metals, ferrous and non-ferrous metals, heavy minerals and industrial minerals) in an area from the surf line of the coast to 5 km out to sea from just south of the Northern Cape border all the way down to Doringbaai.

Managing Director of Protect The West Coast (PTWC), Mike Schlebach, said that he was deeply concerned that despite a recent court order where PTWC and others had stopped Trans Hex from mining near and around the biodiversity hotspot of the Olifants River Estuary, the company was now trying to exploit the richly mineralised deposits of alluvial diamonds off the same coastline.

“Such a proliferation, and deviation from their traditional target of diamonds, raises a big red flag about monopolistic intentions.”

“On top of that, Trans Hex has a terrible environmental track record of non-compliance rehabilitating their coastal mines all the way up into the Northern Cape.”

According to PTWC’s legal team, these two applications by Trans Hex pose significant concerns about a present and future danger to marine archaeological heritage.

The first application, by Trans Hex Operations Pty Ltd, is to mine diamonds for 30 years in two marine concessions offshore of the Sout and Olifants rivers respectively.

These concessions refer to the ocean from 1 km to 5 km offshore, where a remote-controlled seabed machine – operating at depths of up to 200 metres – digs up the seafloor, sucking up tons of gravel onto a large vessel overhead before it is dumped back overboard.

Activist Gavin Craythorne says deep water mining is a serious problem: “These machines are sucking up 600 tons of gravel per hour 24/7. The disturbance to the ocean takes a very long time to rehabilitate.”

The scoping report of the Trans Hex mining application (www.ripl.co.za), also notes three shipwrecks that lie “within the 1 km buffers around the concessions” which means that a “Marine Heritage Impact Assessment will be undertaken”.

The concessions are all prime locations for rich deposits of ancient alluvial diamonds transported over millions of years from the Kimberley region via glaciers and rivers and dispersed in valleys, streams and rivers that wash into the sea. The Sout River and Olifants River estuary have a “highly aggregated diamond population”, according to a doctoral dissertation by Asriël Van der Westhuizen at the University of Stellenbosch in 2012.

Schlebach added that while the dangers of terrestrial mining were well documented and researched by the scientific community, much of the impact of deepsea mining was inadequately studied and its effects largely unknown. But anything razed to that extent must have a negative impact if we’re all a little more honest.

Apart from the archaeological heritage and potential damage to benthic organisms on the seafloor, marine environments could contain significant palaeontological resources, such as fossilised remains of ancient marine organisms, sedimentary formations, and other sensitive geological features.

Unfortunately, the public comment window for the two applications expired on October 1, but if anyone wants to get involved and ‘the deluge of mining applications along the West Coast’, they can sign up as a Ripl user, and voice their concerns against these applications.

While you are there, now is also a good time to make your voice heard on the proposed prospecting activities for copper, Rare Earth, Zirconium Ore and Iron Ore along the Knersvlakte Conservancy Area by Twiga Global Ore.

The area in question also falls within the internationally recognised succulent Karoo biome – the only arid-zone biodiversity hotspot in the world!

Comments close on 24 October 2024 so there is ample time to comment!

 

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News like this makes us want to throw Velvaglo all over a Van Gogh.

[source:ptwc.org]