alt Hacker NewsAs deep-sea mining race ramps up, mission will assess whether ecosystems recover
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Given the current governance structure of mining in international waters with poor countries incentives to sell their rights and look the other way, and past history of early mining practices, the obvious answer is no. We already know there are ecosystems of creatures evolved to survive on detritus of dead animals floating down there and colonies of living things no one would have imagined prior to discovery. One of the most promising sources for mining, modules of metal in vast fields provide opportunities for life to thrive but that won’t come up in a start up’s cost analysis, they can just bury the data, do it and ask for forgiveness later so to speak.
For it feels like we should work harder to mine critical resources in as low impact way possible. We don’t know what this will do. We don’t really need it. No one would get this consented / permitted within their own seabed, so why do we do it in international waters.
I work in subsea cables and the companies that develop this type of tooling also work in this field, on a purely technical level it’s super cool technology and operationally very very interesting - the riser for nodule collection and how you pump / suck something from 4km down to the surface is wildly cool.
Spoiler: No, they dont. They never do. Reports will say "yeah, probably" and in 10-40 years will change to "oooh well they didnt".
Dredging is immoral - so incredibly destructive to the ecosystem. Do you harvest apples by bulldozing the orchard and sifting out the fruit? It's bad enough that so much of our farming is still based on tilling.
I don't really understand why nodule gathering isn't already done - just with some kind of robotic fingers or aimed suction devices. It's not as if nodules are hard to discriminate. Sure, there would be some interesting engineering challenges to operating equipment at scale in that environment, but it's undergrad-engineering-club-level, not rocket science...
I've posted this before here. The science is screaming that these ecosystems cannot recover on any meaningful timescale because these modules form over millions of years and produce the only oxygen available in the depths of the ocean where they're located. It would be like clear cutting a forest and it growing back over the course of millions of years. It's an insane thing to do, and we as a society we're showing we have no care for anything but ourselves in this moment in time. We're choosing to permanently destroy the last best preserved ecosystems on this planet essentially for good.
Deepsea beds also change with volcanism, seismic events, whale carcass deposition and maybe more. Wouldn't studying those events inform the question? Without introducing more destruction.
In fact, estimating the frequency of those 'natural' events, and knowing the current density of deep-sea organisms, aren't we capable of calculating the answer using statistics?
When I see a discussion that amounts to whether we should enforce some rule of international behavior, I find it useful to ask "would you go to war over this?"
If not, maybe you're being more performative than genuine.
I have followed this off and on. For those wondering, TMC [1] is one of the primary companies on the forefront of this. Similarly, the main body in charge of regulation here is the International Seabed Authority [2].
I'll be honest, I don't know how I feel about it. TMC has taken the position that it is potentially better to destroy seabed ecosystems than land based ones with strip mining. (at least that is my take on their position) There is truth in the idea that picking the least bad solution is the responsible thing to do. We will keep mining for these resources so where should we do it? The problem is the unknowns. Effectively, I believe, they are arguing that the unknown dangers are still better than the known damage we do with traditional mining. The sea is a big place after all. Of course they are clearly biased in their thinking since the potential profits here are just staggering so staying objective with hundreds of billions of dollars staring at you is very hard.
A major change in the arguments about impact came with the study that showed the potential for oxygen generation by the nodules being mined. This so called 'dark oxygen' [3] could be a major part of the ecosystem at those depths. Oxygen is really scarce so anything that produces it is likely crucial. I personally don't have a background anywhere close to that required to critique the science around this but it looks interesting and is definitely worth following up on.
The chemistry of these nodules is also interesting but the bottom line is that once they are mined they won't come back. They take a long, long time to form. Like 2-5 mm per million years [4] slow.
Up until the dark oxygen research the main concern was the plume that mining created and what effects it would create on the ecosystem as a whole [5]. There were, and still are, a lot of unknowns about how big it could be, how long it will stick around and the impacts it could have.
Basically, there are a lot of ecosystem unknowns here so weighing the potential impact to the ecosystem from this vs the real, and devastating, impacts from mining on land is a very hard thing.
[1] https://metals.co/ [2] https://isa.org.jm/ [3] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-discove... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manganese_nodule [5] https://phys.org/news/2025-03-deep-sea-sediment-plumes.html
Everybody is against this, yet somehow it still happens.
Democracy ... yeah right.
I read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars triology [1], a series which "chronicles the settlement and terraforming of the planet Mars," years ago.
The first book, Red Mars, contains a debate between the reds, led by a scientist arguing for preserving Mars, and, basically, everyone else, who want to terraform and settle it. The reds are, throughout the book and frankly the series, a collection of extremists. They won't compromise. They blow cool stuff up. They're borderline terrorists, only outdone in the second book (Green Mars) by the Earth corporations that want to fuck up terraforming to maintain control. The only thing I remember being more annoying than the reds in Red Mars were the pages-long descriptions of the fucking escarpments and other geology.
Aside: I love Hemingway and get bored with Steinbeck. Reflecting on this, again years later, I realised they both do the same thing: expand on the banal. For Hemingway, the scenes I most love involve food and drink. Steinbeck, on the other hand, zooms in on the California landscape. I grew up in California, in part–it may be too familiar.
Anyway, the last book in Robinson's series, Blue Mars, is set after terraforming is done. It should be a celebration. And yet, I can't remember any significant plot points. (There was a cool low-g race.) I didn't even realise how boring and immemorable it was until well after I'd read it.
And then it hit me. It's boring because it's Steinbeck. The escarpments are gone. The burning sunrises near the polar ice caps. Gone. The boring stuff from Red Mars? I remember it. The visuals are vivid. They were tedious to digest. But they stuck and they're beautiful. By Blue Mars, however, the setting became ordinary. The idea–doing normal things on Mars–is novel. But the thing itself is not. Robinson turned Mars into a Steinbeck setting.
As I said, I read the trilogy years ago. Then, I lived in New York. I was a technological maximalist. Now, I live in Wyoming and would describe myself as a conditional optimist.
We have the tools to make a better future. But we have a tendency to be thoughtless with new tools. One of the most tragic ways we do that is by succeeding in developing and deploying technologies (autonomous deep-sea submersibles are cool!) that, in the end, homogenise the places, people and things that motivated us to reach out in the start.
THERE IS A COLOSSAL AMOUNT OF SCRUTINIZED, INDEPENDENT, WORLD CLASS RESEARCH PROVING DEEP SEABED POLYMETALLIC NODULE "HARVESTING" IS THE OBVIOUS BEST WAY TO ACCUMULATE THESE MINERALS.
THROUGH CONTINUOUS R&D THERE WILL BE SMALL STEPS AND MOST LIKELY A FEW GIANT LEAPS ALONG THE 4+ DECADES EXPERTS ASSUME AREAS LIKE THE CCZ TO BE EXPLORED/EXTRACTED.
66 years from the Wright Brothers to The Moon landing. USA has been able to harvest these nodules since the 1970's. Imagine how fast this sector will advance to become even more efficient & eco-friendly than it already is after the most brilliant minds and government monies are able to be focused on it.
It's the 'lesser-of-two-evils' if you want to force yourself into that perspective. I look at it as a revolutionary industry that couldn't happen at a better time.
My understanding is that deep-sea nodules produce oxygen by a process similar to electrolysis, where they generate currents that split seawater into hydrogen and oxygen.
The proportion of global abiotic and global total oxygen production this represents is not known, but may be significant.
Leaving aside the certainty of yet more cascading collapses of marine life in waters de-oxygenated by deep sea mining: do we want to risk finding out the hard way how significant?
Apparent consensus is we do, but I don’t have to like it, or think these are the plans of sane people who see the big picture.