East Coast deep-sea mining site story first of its kind | News

When The Post and Courier hired a scientist to cover the environment, the benefit to readers is a newspaper breaking local news of global import.

The recent publication about a “lost” deep-sea mining site off the coast of Charleston was first reported in The Post and Courier during a year when the United Nations body that manages the international seabed will decide whether to finally allow commercial mining of the deep sea.

This is Sunshine Week. It’s a newspaper tradition for decades now to spend one week in March looking at the landscape of public records and public meetings in our coverage areas. This annual audit ensures that the public’s right to know isn’t eroding under our watch.

It’s also a chance to celebrate the behind-the-scenes ways reporters at The Post and Courier use public records to find stories that no one else is covering.

Projects Reporter Clare Fieseler found the deep-sea mining story while researching the endangered North Atlantic right whales. She saw something on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website about deep-sea mining in the Atlantic Ocean.

“It was very short and vague, four paragraphs about an expedition,” Fieseler said.

More than 50 years ago, about 130 miles off the coast of Charleston, a company completed the world’s first successful experimental deep-sea mining operations. But the concentrations of minerals the company sought — manganese and cobalt — were more dense and profitable in the Pacific Ocean. After a successful 1970 test of its newly patented equipment, the company turned its attention westward.

Deep-sea mining companies never again returned to the East Coast waters, and the damage they left there was largely forgotten.

An expedition was formed to revisit and photograph the world’s first experimental mining site to see if and how well the sea floor had recovered.

Fieseler called the scientist on the expedition and he told her she was the first person to show interest.

“He said it took him six years to find the site, and when we went there, it was like (the miners) were there yesterday,” she said. “Those two things made me realize there was a story. This was clearly a scoop.”

Through a grant from the Pulitzer Center, Fieseler made two trips to Woods Hole, Mass., produced a short film, attended a scientific meeting in New Orleans and traveled to the archives of a museum in Newport News, Va.

As a result, The Post and Courier published the first look at the world’s oldest known human-made damage to the deep sea from mining.

Fieseler was given early access to the images of the sea floor from the expedition. She interviewed a deep-sea biologist and then got a rare interview with the CEO of a deep-sea mining company.

“Everyone wanted to talk,” she said. “This is an important year for deep-sea mining.”

Fieseler used the same science-led news sense to find another story The Post and Courier published recently about the gruesome death of several endangered sea turtles.

A scientist suggested she look into the number of turtles harmed by beach renourishment. She pulled up a database to research and realized she was looking at something unexpected: a record of turtles that had been chopped up by dredging operations.

“No one had analyzed this data before. Landing on that database was like walking on fresh snow with no tracks,” she said.

Fieseler filed a Freedom of Information Act request for sea turtle deaths and found that those responsible for excessive deaths had been warned but continued. There was no penalty.

She and fellow reporter Hongyu Liu spent three months working on the story “ ‘Chopped up’: Sea turtle death toll rises as dredge restrictions unravel.” The story published in January.

In addition to her reporting, Fieseler is the author of the weekly Rising Waters: Climate Stories of the South newsletter that comes out on Tuesdays. That is where readers can find the latest on The Post and Courier’s environmental and conservation reporting, and read the work of the Rising Waters Lab — a two-person, community funded reporting team dedicated full-time to reporting on coastal resilience and flooding issues.