Science Friday - Cuts To NASA And A Fast-Track For Deep Sea Mining

Episode Date: May 9, 2025

Proposed budget cuts for NASA would jeopardize space research. And an executive order could change the political tides for deep sea mining.On May 2, the Trump Administration proposed a 24% budget cut for NASA. It would slash funding for science while setting billions aside for initiatives to send humans to the moon and Mars. New Scientist editor Sophie Bushwick joins us to talk about this, as well as other news in science, like how many U.S. cities are sinking, the search for geologic hydrogen within mountains, the first photos of free-floating atoms, Chinese poetry about porpoises, and cicadas turned into speakers.And, President Trump recently issued an executive order that would fast-track access for deep sea mining. Soon after, a Canadian company called The Metals Company submitted the first application for NOAA to review. This has raised environmental and climate concerns, as well as geopolitical tensions. Ocean geologist Sandor Mulsow breaks down what’s at stake for the ocean.Guests:Sophie Bushwick, senior news editor at New Scientist in NYCDr. Sandor Mulsow, marine geologist at the Austral University of ChileTranscript will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.  Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flito. The Trump administration recently proposed a 24% budget cut for NASA. And if it passes, it will be the largest slash to the agency's budget in a single year ever. Their proposal also includes cutting NASA's science budget almost in half and shifting the agency's priorities to sending people to the moon and Mars. So what's at stake here? Sophie Bushwick, senior news editor at New Science. in New York is here to break it down and tell us more about this week in science. Sophie, welcome back. Thank you. Let's get right into this. What kinds of cuts does this budget include? What's on the chopping block here? So this budget would cut major NASA science programs. So, for instance, the sending robots to other planets like the rovers on Mars would be in trouble. There's a mission to

bring rocks back for Mars, that would be in trouble. There was a proposed space station around the moon that would be at issue. And closer to Earth, the international space station would lose funds to send astronauts there and to have research done. These are like the jewels of the NASA space program, aren't they? Yes. And there's also the Nancy Greece Roman Space Telescope, which is sort of considered the next big telescope after the James Webb Space Telescope. And that one is almost complete. It's on track to be done soon, but this budget proposes removing any support to actually get it into space. So we've spent all this money to send rovers to Mars to collect samples that are waiting there, right, to be picked up? That's right. You can learn so much by bringing back rock

samples from other bodies in space, you know, samples from the moon or from an asteroid. And these Mars rocks could be really, really amazing sources of information for scientists here on Earth. And they're just kind of sitting around waiting for us to bring them back. So let's be clear. If this budget passes, it's going to fundamentally change NASA, right? Yes, this would be a major change in NASA's priorities. And like you said, the biggest single year cut to its budget. But I don't think we all need to be panicking quite yet because the budget proposed budget has to get through Congress. And in the past, presidents have proposed cutting NASA's budget and Congress has restored it. Because NASA is a really popular agency. A lot of Americans are interested in science and space exploration. And so it's still possible that these proposed cuts won't necessarily go through.

So if these cuts do go through, where does the money go to? So right now the focus is going to be shifting to getting humans to places in space, specifically to the moon and to Mars. That's where it seems like the Trump administration wants NASA to put its priorities. But it's canceling one of our major space programs to get to the moon, isn't it? Yes. It's canceling missions that are aimed at sending, you know, robots to the moon, for example. But the idea is that NASA should be focusing more on getting astronauts there. And I wonder who might be taking those astronauts there. Well, Elon Musk has expressed that he's interested in sending humans to Mars, in having humans colonized space and starting there.

And so it's possible that a mission to send humans to Mars would be using a space X rocket. In fact, SpaceX is planning to send an uncrewed mission to Mars in 26. And that would, if they got budgetary support from NASA, I'm sure they would be very pleased with that. All right. We'll have to keep our eyes on that, as you say, see what happens in Congress. On to other news, according to a new study, if you live in a big city, you might be sinking. If you live in a big city, you're probably sinking.

You're probably sinking. Yeah, researchers looked at almost every U.S. city with a population of 600,000 or more, and they found 25 out of 28 are sinking by an average of a couple millimeters a year and sometimes more. Wow, all the big cities you're talking about. Why are they sinking? So one thing that the researchers pinpointed was groundwater extraction. So when you pull water out of the ground, it doesn't just shift the makeup under the ground. It also shifts what's above it. And in cities where you've got these heavy buildings pressing down, this can create a measurable difference. And then there's also issues with things like, you know, after the last ice age, when the ice retreated in the glacier, is pulled back, our land is still changing in response to that geologic event. So that's playing a role for cities like New York and Washington, D.C., which are near where, you know, used to have glacier cover. But the biggest changes seem to be happening in Texas. Houston is the fastest

sinking city out of all of these. About 42% of its land is sinking by a rate of more than five millimeters a year, and some of it is even twice as fast as that. And one of the issues there is that in Texas, there's a lot of oil and gas extraction from under the ground. So just as groundwater extraction can cause changes, so can that. Well, they do big things in Texas. I guess they sink bigly there also. Yeah. Yes. Everything's bigger in Texas. Right. Well, let's switch just a little that Sophie, because scientists are looking, this I found just crazy. They're looking for hydrogen beneath mountains, right? That's right. Hydrogen would be an amazing energy source because, you know, it can burn as fuel without releasing greenhouse gas emissions. And rocks naturally create hydrogen,

certain minerals when they interact with water do. But the problem is they're under the ground, and many of them are very, very deep. But now researchers are saying, look, when mountain rage is form, some rock from deep underneath is brought up closer to the surface where it can have this reaction with water and create hydrogen. So maybe under the mountains is where we should be looking for hydrogen. Is there enough hydrogen under there that makes it worthwhile to drill? We don't know yet. And the other thing is, you know, is there enough there that drilling wouldn't be so bad for the environment that it would be counterproductive? So if the whole point of hydrogen is being clean fuel, we don't want to have this drilling operation that would create enough pollution that it would no longer be clean.

Speaking of atoms, physicists have just snapped the first photos of individual atoms. How do you do a close-up of an atom? With great difficulty. So in previous times, they've imaged atoms, but these are the first free-range atoms that they've captured. And the way they did it is they had a cloud of atoms kind of. of interacting with each other, allowed to move freely, and then they kind of froze it briefly by hitting it with lasers, and then they hit it with another laser to take the image of those frozen atoms before releasing them again. So that gave them the ability to capture these

images. And what did they find out about the atoms, or if anything, when they captured the images? Well, different types of atoms behave differently depending on how they interact with each other. So for a kind of particle called a boson, where all of the different particles have the same quantum mechanical state, they saw them behaving as quantum theory predicts, behaving like a wave and bunching together. And so this is a great example of quantum theory being illustrated in a real experimental case. So there's not much practical stuff you can do with this, but it just It verifies a theory. Yes, yes.

And it's also, it's just a great way to have experimental confirmation of things that are predicted by quantum theory. Yeah, yeah. That's interesting. Sophie, let's move on to a new study that incorporates ancient Chinese poetry to study porpoises. You've got to tell me about this. This is so cool. So the Yangtze finless porpoise is an endangered species that lives in, the Yangtze River, and researchers really want to be able to track its historical distribution.

But the problem is, you know, your historical records aren't necessarily talking about the porpoises there, but your poems are. Poems, you know, you can track, you can say the person who wrote this poem lived in this specific area along this specific part of the river, and does their poem mention the porpoises? It turns out more than 700 do, and about half of those poems mentioned where? along the river the porpoises were. And that gave the researchers an idea of the porpoises historical range, which over the past 1,400 years, it seems to have shrunk by 65%. Wow. Wow. Have they, have scientists used poetry like this before? In some cases, yes. You know, poetry can preserve a lot of information about an ancient culture, about the animals that were living in, say, ancient Greece.

You know, you can learn about that from reading an ancient epic poem. So this is not the first scientific use of poetry. Looking at some of those Grecian urns also. Yes, absolutely. Before we go, I hear you've got a musical quiz for me. What's up with this? Yeah, I want you to try to identify the musical instrument that is playing this song. Whoa.

Sounds like an ear hearing test. No. Oh, what's playing that song? I give up. That song is being played on the bodies of cicadas. You mean they're getting, they're teaching the cicadas how to play that song? No, researchers have transformed cicadas into cyborgs and they're playing them the way you would play a musical instrument. They basically found a way to control the organs that cicadas used to make noise called timbles. And they, they, you know, you've probably heard them during the summer making a racket outside.

Right. Apparently the frequency or the pitch of the sound that the cicadas making, it can be tuned by the frequency with which it's flexing this organ called the timble. And researchers basically plugged electrodes into cicadas and controlled the timbles and used them to play music. Are we looking for the first cicada insect band here, you think? This might be, but I think the researchers have some. suggested that, you know, you could use these cyborg loudspeakers to send warning messages during an emergency. But I think the researchers were just listening to some cicadas and thought, huh, I'd like to do that. I think you're right. I'm going to go with that, Sophie.

Well, I mean, in the past, there's been research to, you know, remote control cockroaches. You can also, you know, turn those into these living cyborgs. So that was also an influence on this research. I see the movie. I can see the movie now, Sophie. Thank you for joining us with all this great stuff you bring all the time. My pleasure. I'm always happy to play some cyborg music for you. Sophie Bushwick, senior news editor at New Scientist in New York. Coming up after the break, the Trump administration is pushing for deep sea mining. An ocean geologist tells us what's at stake.

If they're going to ravage the bottom of the sea in this area of the Clarence Clipperton zone, we are talking about an area equivalent to the size of Mongolian. President Trump recently signed an executive order to fast-track deep sea mining. That would mean companies could dredge the seafloor to collect the nodules of cobalt, copper, rare earth elements, and other minerals down there, which can be used to make things like electronic, solar panels, and wind turbines. After the executive order dropped, a Canadian mining firm called the metals company submitted the very first application to mine in international waters, which,

the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, is now considering. This move has sparked a backlash from scientists and environmental groups and raised geopolitical concerns. Here to explain is Dr. Sandar Mulsso, marine geologist at the Austral University of Chile. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you very much, Ira, and good evening or good morning. I don't know what time this will be on the air to all the people who are listening to Science Friday. Tell me why there's such pushback against this. What is the danger about collecting these nodules deep sea? The major danger, first of all, is they're not renewable.

So once you take them out, that's it. Because every single nodule, it grows very slowly a few millimeters per million years. So right now, the size of the nodules that we collect in average, they have maybe 10 to 20 million years old. So if you collect them, they're gone. Right now, if you collect a few centimeters, let's say 10 centimeters of the seafloor with the nodules, you are collecting sediments as all as 10,000 years old

because sedimentation rates in that part of the world after 5 kilometers of water depth is very slow. It's one centimeter every thousand years. So when you remove sediments as all as 10,000 to 20,000 years, you are going to put on the surface of the water in the water column all the CO2 who has been stored for 10,000 to 20,000. 20,000 years old. So that's the major impact. The size of a mine on the deep sea to make some kind of profit, it has to be at least 3,000 square kilometers of dredging. And if we do a

comparison with landminer, which are not clean neither, the biggest open copper pit mine is in Chile, which is Chukikamata, where I'm coming from. But that mine is only 15 square kilometers, 200 smaller, and you can see this hole from satellites. Can you imagine what will happen on the deep sea? And that is one miner. So if they're going to ravage the bottom of the sea in this area of the Clarence Clipperton zone, we are talking about an area equivalent to the size of Mongolia. So what are we solving?

We are not solving anything. The only thing that we are solving is to make rich a few people like the metal company. Who is supposed to be in charge of deep sea mining regulations? should be in charge the international debate authority. This is an independent organization where 169 member states are represented there, and they are supposed to govern and deal with the licenses for exploration

and exploitation in the international waters. Since they are not a UN body, they are not buying to respond to the Secretary General in New York, Gutierrez. They have their own Secretary General. So they are like an independent. and it's a very marquee water. So unfortunately, the United States, they never ratify this UN clause

so they can do whatever they want in international waters. And they have their own agency to provide and govern this mining international waters. As you just mentioned, it was NOAA. Right now, we are in a conundrum because we are eroding the floor of the international debate authority and the international law in general. general with this unilateral decision of United States. So why would a Canadian company ask no his permission to drill in international waters then? Because the Canadian, they saw the loophole, you know, if they do through the Americans, and you have a president right now who seems to be

going with their own will, and the American, they signed the Convention of the Law of the Sea, but they not ratify. What does the difference between these two things? If you sign, sign and you don't ratify, that means that the executive power can take any decision on whatever it's signed. But if they ratify the Convention of the Law of the C, it's a different day, it's a different signature, you need to ask your Congress for any activity that you want to do in that particular area that is governed by this international organization. So, unfortunately, for the whole international community, we have nothing we can do. Is there great pushback amongst your scientific colleagues? Of course, most of the scientists that we know, I all had, and they said,

you know, this is nonsense. We cannot go do deep sea mining. We don't even know the bathymetry of the place, how the seafloor looks like. Yeah. I want to talk about climate change for a minute, because as you've hinted, one of the reasons behind deep sea mining is we need materials for solar panels and wind turbines and EVs to take some pressure off the planet's surface. That's what they're, that's what they're saying we need to do. That's why we need to mine these nodules. What's your response to that? It's very simple. There is no need. The reason is because when you look at the grade of the element that you, they are so-called strategic and critical, the only one on the manganese nodules, which is more or less equivalent in quantity for the old Clareon-Cliperton

song compared to Lange is nickel. All the other ones are below whatever we have on. land. We need to scrap huge amount of the ocean, not only the clarion cliferton'some, to reach those levels. But copper, iron and manganis, they are very high in gray compared to land. They are not rare earth.

The rare earth meaning that we need them more because we need the magnets to build the magnets. Without magnets, there is no turbine, there is no anything, no electric car. But one thing that we never pay attention is when you do

mine, one thing is to take the mineral from the rock because you need the element. This little pass from the rock to the element is called metallurgic. And the metallurgic, it produces huge amount of CO2. So what are we solving? Nothing. To get one kilo of pure copper, right, which is simple. Many countries are producing copper worldwide. You generate between 8 and 12 kilos of CO2. This is gas. Just imagine the volume. And for one kilo of one of these rare earth metals, we are talking about 15 to 20 kilograms of CO2. One of the question is, why is China kind of looking like they control rare earth mineral?

Because nobody in the world wanted to do the metallurgy where was so contaminated processes. So everybody sent the material to China and you China, you kill your people and just give us the rare earth mineral. Right now, the Chinese, they can do their own technology, right? So they don't need to sell you the rare earth mineral back. That's when the American, the rest of the world, realize, wow, we need to do the dirty job in our backyard now. You see?

So the narrative is more complex. Yeah, yeah. That's why it's called rare earth, right? Not that the element's rare. It's rare. It's tough to get it out. out of the ore, right? Exactly. There are tiny little elements in a huge formula of one mineral.

Let's talk about the current state of deep sea mining. How many contracts has the International Seabed Authority granted and what countries are really pushing for it? Well, there are 19 countries, right? And there are 31 contracts licenses for exploration and they are everywhere, north-south Atlantic, North Pacific, Indian, and the one who is really pushing behind are entrepreneurs. Is this for exploitation or exploration? All of them are exploration. Right, but the metals company that we talked about is for exploitation.

They want to go down. Exactly. With all of this said, we're talking about this, why would a country or a company wait for the ISA to greenlight a mining permit if the U.S. could be willing to do it for you? Because nobody thought that anyone would go through Americans. As simple as that. So they all went through the common sense and consensus to do any process of exploitation of the deep sea in international water should follow international law.

But with the president you have, he can step on the international law and he's doing it since day one. So there is no miracle in that. But here we have a real loophole because the NOAA can really issue licenses for mining in international water. Let's say, what about if there are 169 countries say, no, no, we're not going to do? Well, we're going to be in a confrontation because the American will go to do the work in the Claren Clipperton song. What the other country has to do? Send warships to the place. They're not going to. Do you think other countries can follow suit and take advantage of this loophole? They're all looking around.

You know, they're all looking what's going to happen now in July, August, which is the annual meeting of the International Space Authority. I hope that I will be there because this is going to be historical. It will be laid out the future of international law, as simple as that. Right, right. Sandra, it seems like issues with deep sea mining have really stalled for years as countries wait for the rules to set. But you're saying that Trump administration,

and bypassing those rules. Yeah. Right? Doesn't need any rule. And your greatest concern is that everyone else will take advantage. Exactly. Yeah. You're listening to the people who follow you.

They should think not only in todays, in how we are going to do the next 10 days or 10 years, but just think in the future generation, what work are we going to live to our kids? The last boundary, there are nine boundaries who makes our planet, the planet we have, keep the life that we know. And we are screwing up already with six of them. The number seven is called ocean acidification. And with this thing, it will be exacerbated. Remember that I mentioned

before, we will release CO2 sequester for thousands of years back to the water again. Right. Carbolic acid, you're going to acidify. That's right. Can you imagine two or three generations ahead? Sandra, when money is involved, who care? You care and I and I care? And I care. And I care? I think there are many people who cares and we should care. We should care. And that's why we're talking about it. And that's why I'm so happy you've come on to talk about it, Dr. Mulsol. So thank you.

For your work, you're doing for taking time to talk with us. Thank you very much, Ira. Dr. Sander Mulsow is a marine geologist at the Austral University of Chile. And heads up, that Monday, we've got something special on the feed. A brand new audio documentary series, Flora has worked on with a hypothesis Fund called The Leap. In the first episode, Flora talks to Nobel Prize winner, Cadi Caracow, about going all in on MRNA when the field was convinced it was a dead end. I have to say that when I mentioned to somebody that I make MRNA and I work with it,

they usually felt sorry if they were sympathetic or if they're less sympathetic, they thought that I am crazy. That's Monday on the podcast. That's about all the time we have. For now, a lot of people help make this show happen. Shoshana Bucksbaum. Beth Rami. Danielle Johnson. Jackie Hirschfeld. I'm Ira Flato. Thanks for listening.