Virupaxa K. Banakar is a treasure hunter. This scientist from the National Institute of Oceanography, Goa, may not have studied metallurgy in school but is passionate about metals, particularly precious ones. He has been hunting for them for more than a decade. However, unlike others in the field, he looks for them in the high seas. To be more precise, on seamounts that have risen from the ocean floor over millions of years.

Currently, India has no known reserves of either platinum or cobalt. But Banakar’s team recently reported spotting deposits of platinum in his favourite hunting ground — the Afanasiy-Nikitin seamount, more than a three kilometre-tall seamount in the equatorial Indian Ocean. His team earlier discovered cobalt in the same set of deep sea crusts it had collected on its expeditions a few years ago.

Banakar is very modest about the find. “A few ferromanganese crust samples that we picked up from the seamount showed high traces of these metals. Their concentrations were found to be far higher than in the current land-based deposits,” he told KnowHow. The NIO scientists reported their work in the February 2007 issue of the Journal of Earth System Science.

Platinum is an extremely rare metal, occurring as only 5 parts per billion (ppb) — 5 gm in 1,000 tonnes — in the earth’s crust. In comparison, the concentration in the samples collected by the NIO scientists was nearly 1,000 ppb. Similarly, cobalt content in the samples was twice that in the best ores currently mined in the world. Priced anywhere between Rs 1,500 and Rs 3,000 a kilo in the international market, cobalt finds use in a wide range of industries such as steel making and the electronics industry. In 2004, India used 500 tonnes of cobalt, produced from metal scrap imported from other countries.

Banakar, however, feels it is too early to say whether the Afanasiy-Nikitin seamount has an exploitable reserve. He says that despite the samples they have randomly picked, a larger feasibility survey is required in the region.

The ministry of earth sciences (earlier the department of ocean development) has already granted funds to Banakar’s team for this.

Studying deep sea crusts is not just important for economic reasons; it also throws light on how oceans have formed. This branch of science, called paleo-oceanography, focuses on the deposition of various chemical compounds that are brought into the oceans by rivers. These layers take millions of years to form, even as much as by a few millimetres.

The signatures of the past are embedded in these layers and modern scientific techniques are capable of extracting details of ocean formation, climate and life on earth from them, says Banakar.