Luise Heinrich
Report of GLOMAR PhD student Luise Heinrich about her participation in the Underwater Mining Conference 2017 in Berlin, Germany from 24 to 29 September 2017
The Underwater Mining Conference is an annual conference focused on deep-sea mining. It provides a platform for representatives of industry, governments and academia to meet and share information about current research activities. Since its establishment in Wisconsin in 1970, the conference has considerably grown to about 200 participants in Berlin this year. While it was my first time to attend the underwater mining conference, many participants have been a part of the “deep-sea mining family” for many years.
The conference started on Sunday, 24th of September, with an icebreaker event at the Hilton Hotel in Berlin. This was a great first opportunity to meet colleagues from many different academic and professional backgrounds in a friendly and welcoming environment. The conference itself took place on Monday, 25th of September, and Tuesday 26th of September, and was subdivided into two technical sessions, which comprised about 20 presentations each. While the presentations on the first day were mainly concerned with the exploration of deep-sea mineral deposits and the extraction of metals, the second day focused primarily on environmental impact research and technological advances in the development of subsea mining equipment.
My talk on the life-cycle based comparison of deep-sea mining and terrestrial mining – mainly focusing on issues related to fuel consumption and corresponding emissions – took place on Tuesday afternoon. I received very positive feedback on my presentation and the project. For me, it was very important to present my work at this conference to establish a network of industry contacts as most of the data on deep-sea mining equipment is not publicly available. Introducing myself and my project to the companies was very helpful, and many approached me afterwards to talk more about my research and provide suggestions about potential data sources.
In the evening of both days we had the chance to further talk and discuss with other participants at a small exhibition event organized by companies and research institutes and during a banquette at the Hilton Hotel, which concluded the event.
I would like to thank GLOMAR and Jacobs University Bremen, who financially supported my participation in this very interesting and extremely relevant conference.
