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Abstract New marine industries that develop and grow in response to the changing demand for their products have the potential to exert pressure on fragile marine environments. These emerging industries can benefit local communities but equally can have negative environmental and socio-cultural impacts. The development of new and emerging industries, like deep seabed mining (DSM), requires the acceptance and involvement of local communities. Yet, the history of marine exploitation is imbued with conflicts between industries and local communities. This paper presents a DSM case study in Papua New Guinea (PNG) to stimulate debate around the potential for conflict in the pursuit of resource extraction from the deep sea and the social and environmental harm that these extractions can cause. We do so by first presenting a timeline of local and extra-local events and enabling conditions that form the development background for the DSM Solwara 1 project in PNG. We then undertake a media narrative analysis to consider the contribution of aspects of social acceptability to this highly complex and multi-scale conflict. We find that the lack of (or a decrease in) social acceptability contributed to the conflict situation and ultimately the demise of the Solwara 1 project. Extra-locally, the initial development was positively framed around solutions for decarbonisation using new technology. Over time, actions by international NGOs, financial issues related to foreign companies, and asymmetry in the power balance between the Pacific Island nation and global businesses played a role in growing negative perceptions of acceptability. Historical experiences with prior environmental mining disasters, together with sea tenure governance challenges, and a lack of community and stakeholder acceptance also contributed to the demise of the project. Untangling and debating these complex interactions provides context and reasons for the tension between the lack of societal acceptance at a local scale and the perceived need for DSM products in the global North for innovative technologies and decarbonising societies. Better understanding these interactions and tensions can help emerging industries navigate a future blue economy. 

Designing air-water systems for industrial applications requires a fundamental understanding of mass accommodation at the liquid-vapor interface, which depends on many factors, including temperature, vapor concentration, and impurities that vary with time. Hence, understanding how mass accommodation changes over a droplet’s lifespan is critical for predicting the performance of applications leveraging evaporation. In this study, experimental data of water droplets on a gold-coated surface evaporating into dry nitrogen is coupled with a computational model to measure the accommodation coefficient at the liquid-vapor interface. We conduct this measurement by combining macroscopic observations with the microscopic kinetic theory of gasses. The experiments utilize a sensitive piezoelectric device to determine the droplet radius with high accuracy and imaging to measure the droplet contact angle. This setup also quantifies the trace amounts of non-volatile impurities in the droplet. For water droplets evaporating in a pure nitrogen stream, the accommodation coefficient directly relates to vapor flux over the droplet’s surface and is affected by the presence of impurities. We obtained a surface-averaged accommodation coefficient close to 0.001 across multiple water droplets evaporating close to room temperature. This quantification can aid in conducting a more accurate analysis of evaporation, which can assist in the improved design of evaporation-based applications. We believe the modeling approach presented in this work, which integrates the kinetic theory of gases to the macroscale flow behavior, can provide a basis for predicting evaporation kinetics in the presence of extremely dry non-condensable gas streams.