alt Hacker NewsDeepsea 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?
We simply don't have the sensing capability to do more than sporadic sampling of the ocean floor environment in a small number of geographically constrained locales. The ocean is huge and ocean floor sensing is expensive.
My understanding from working with scientists that study this kind of thing is that the default hypothesis was that the ocean floor was relatively static and changed slowly. The last couple decades of research has largely refuted that hypothesis, as sensing evidence consistently suggests a much more dynamic environment.
AFAIK, we do not have a model that explains the rate and diversity of environmental change observed on the ocean floor in these limited experiments. This makes it a really important open question in science, since things like climate change almost certainly strongly interact with these dynamics. Unfortunately no one expects us to have enough data to even attempt a credible hypothesis for a couple decades. The ocean is simply too big.
People underestimate how little we know about the subsurface ocean. For climate science it is probably the single biggest question. We can't build a useful model without filling that gap.
One potentially positive externality of deep-sea mining is that it may significantly increase the amount of data available.