The Marine Dredging Project involves extracting diamondiferous material from the seabed and pumping it onto land via a steel pipeline. The Project reached a major milestone with the arrival of one of the world’s largest dredgers in Atlantic 1 as part of the project’s Trial Mining operation. Depicted in the illustration below, this mining concept involves mining gravel material offshore (1), transfer to land via a pipeline (2,3) and then processing of material (4). The main objective of the Atlantic 1 Dredging Trial operation is to evaluate the economic application of the Trailing Suction Hopper Dredge (TSHD) mining method. The TSHD is chartered by De Beers Marine Namibia (DBMN) for the period January to March 2006.  The first 4 weeks of dredging will be evaluated in detail, entailing high resolution surveys and sampling with the drillship Coral Sea to determine cleanup efficiency.  The pipeline consists of approximately 850m of steel pipe sections and another 100m of flexible hose at the seaward end.  The pipe has an internal diameter of 1.1m and all the pipe sections have been specially manufactured for this project. An Environmental Impact Assessment has been completed and approval received from respective regulatory bodies.  Significant emphasis is placed on the assessment of the operation’s impact on the environment, and several detailed investigations will be executed before, during and after the dredging operation.