SPC Geoscience Division

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39th Annual Session Download as iCal file
From Saturday, 16 October 2010 -  12:00am
To Friday, 22 October 2010 - 11:59pm
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Hosted by the Government of Australia

The SOPAC Annual Session is a meeting of the Secretariat Governing Council and has four components:

  • A Plenary Session covers the procedural aspects of the meeting and the presentation of reports from member countries, donor Governments and organisations, and the Secretariat. This session is a meeting of the Council at which other delegates are invited as observers, contributing to the discussion of non-technical matters concerning SOPAC such as cooperation and funding.
  • A meeting of the Technical Advisory Group (TAG) to consider the SOPAC Work Program. All TAG members participate as equals during this meeting.
  • A meeting of the Science Technology and Resources Network STAR which is an open forum for reporting geoscientific research in the South Pacific and for exchanging information and ideas between scientists from SOPAC Member Countries and the international geoscientific community.
  • A Governing Council meeting to discuss the administrative and financial business of SOPAC, which may be both closed and/or open to observers.

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Newsflash

Concerns about protecting the environment during exploration and mining for deep seabed minerals will not be addressed by a ‘one size fits all’ solution.

Dr Malcolm Clark, Principal Scientist (Deepwater Fisheries) at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) Wellington, New Zealand, expressed this opinion during the international workshop on Environmental Management Needs for Exploration and Exploitation of Deep Seabed Minerals.

The workshop, jointly organised by SOPAC a division of the Secretariat of the Pacific Community and the International Seabed Authority, took place in Nadi, Fiji, during December 2011, as a part of the European Union funded, four-year Deep Seabed Minerals Project.

Dr Clark said that the more we learn about the deep sea the more we realise that parts of it are split up into smaller environmental packages, and we don’t have a good understanding of how large these package-like “ecosystems” are, or the degree of connectivity between them.

There are three types of deep seabed deposits that are being considered as potential resources to be mined: massive sulfide deposits cobalt crusts, and manganese nodules.