The world’s oceans, tomorrow’s Economic Promised Land?

Will the twenty-first century be that of underwater minerals? Nodules, crusts, sulphides and rare earths (1) have become the avowed objective of our conquest of the most accessible stretches of the ocean floor, and a wide range of marine products—salt, seashells, sand, oil and gas, minerals, phosphates—can be added to this list. But yet more resources now offer themselves to us: tides, waves and temperature differences can be used to generate energy; and living organisms too are no strangers to our quest: glues, colouring agents, algae, ambergris, oil, molecules for the pharmaceutical industry were or are still part of the extraordinary catalogue of what the sea has to offer us.
Nowadays, this inventory needs to be revised. Many resources that used to be considered absolutely essential have since been relegated to the rank of accessory or historical curiosity. Salt, for example, a vital resource for the preservation and consumption of many different foodstuffs, has lost much of its value since the invention of refrigeration. The (Tyrian) purple dye that used to be extracted from murex sea snails is now only of archaeological interest. Seashells (mother of pearl, decoration, tools) have been reduced to merely decorative objects since shirt buttons began to be made of plastic, although the pearls of the Persian Gulf or Ceylon continue to be traded.
Deposits of sand and gravel for building are still of interest, but the trade in coral has become strictly regulated. Whalebone or ‘baleen’, indispensable for stiffening umbrellas and corsets (!) until the early twentieth century, is but a distant memory. The price of oil, on the other hand, rose significantly following various conflicts in the Middle East, and this increase justified the acceleration of the search for new offshore and ‘deep offshore’ fields. Yet all this does not mean that scouring the world’s oceans is only of marginal interest nowadays: quite the contrary; but the fact remains that we owe our ability to access these resources to a triple revolution—technological, scientific and legal.

André Louchet

Professor emeritus of geography at the Sorbonne, and the author of (notably) La planète océane (Armand Colin) and l’Atlas des mers et océans (Autrement).

Ajouter un commentaire