Mining the Ocean Floor: Good Idea?

While commodities traders still work their way out of a historic slump, Japan is looking ahead to the next boom. According to Bloomberg News, next year a group of Japanese companies and government agencies will start mining minerals at a site 1,000 miles southwest of Tokyo -- and one mile beneath the ocean's surface. It will be the first large-scale test of whether mineral deposits can be mined commercially from the seafloor.

The project is fairly bold. The seafloor is home to priceless deposits of minerals such as gold, copper and cobalt. And thanks to new technologies, it might soon be exploitable. That's potentially good news for miners and commodity speculators. But it poses some alarming challenges for the marine environment -- and the economies that depend on it.