Comment by doodlebugging

19 hours ago

Sometimes the first opportunity to see something occurs while you are actively destroying the habitat where it lives. Sounds like your friend's work took advantage of the access that deep sea trawlers would have to species unknown to science, allowing them to have a rough idea of their distribution. In a sense this is very useful to researchers who can argue the case that trawling is too destructive for that area due to the presence of species new to science.

Trawling and mining, both activities mentioned in the article, can be very destructive to habitats. With the global race to lock up sources of rare elements and elements that are more commonly found in conflict zone nations the sea floor is seen as the best source for some of these. The manganese nodules that I learned about in geoscience classes decades ago are targeted by miners today who will have no qualms about scraping the seafloor clean just as those fishing fleets strip the oceans of wild fish species.

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doodlebugging

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nradov  9 hours ago

FWIW, one of the executives working on seafloor mining claims that they'll only suck up a limited pattern of manganese nodules from the seafloor and leave the rest undisturbed. If we're going to have an industrial economy then we do need the metals and extracting them will inevitably cause some environmental impact whether that's on land or under the ocean.

https://music.youtube.com/podcast/2zrIilw-87k

__bb  16 hours ago

> The manganese nodules that I learned about in geoscience classes decades ago are targeted by miners today who will have no qualms about scraping the seafloor clean

This (and the concept of extinction credits) is an opening plot point in the book “Venomous Lumpsucker”, which I found a good read.

XorNot  14 hours ago

No one is mining manganese from the sea floor. The whole idea was a CIA cover story for a mission to recover a sunken Soviet submarine that the Americans knew the location of but the Soviets didn't. They needed an explanation for a cargo ship headed out to a specific area with deep sea construction equipment on board: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian

  • juahan  12 hours ago

    It was a cover, but they did not invent it. It is an actual sudied thing and there has been some experimental mining operations as well.

  • doodlebugging  5 hours ago

    Please take a moment to review some of the latest details about the subject. I was in college in the 80's and early 90's and this was already being described as a done deal once the technology matured. The Glomar Explorer event had occurred in 1974, and was public info by 1975.

    Here for you today is a useful link to a company that is hoping to be the first to operate on a large scale in defined zones [0] such as the CCZ, Clarion-Clipperton Zone, [1]. The technology is already mature and has been for several decades but the process was delayed while appropriate regulations for access to the seafloor and monitoring of destructive potential and harms to existing seafloor organisms could be evaluated and understood, allowing mitigation techniques to be developed. It has become clear in the mining operations that have occurred that the damage to the seafloor takes significant time to repair itself, thousands of years or longer, and that the scars from the operations are functionally permanent.

    [0]https://metals.co/coverage/

    [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarion%E2%80%93Clipperton_zon...

    One article from 2025 linked on the Metals Company website has a Barrons interview with their CEO and he describes the current situation as he saw it. [2]

    [2]https://www.barrons.com/news/no-doubt-canadian-firm-will-be-...

    All articles linked there date to 2025 and some of them are broken but most still work.

    The Chinese were mining the seafloor nodules before 2019 [3] and as of that date had more exploration licenses than any other nation.

    [3]https://dialogue.earth/en/ocean/10891-china-deep-sea-explora...

    Basically, there is mining activity already in progress and it has been locked in a process of licensing and regulatory framework definition for a long time. It is inevitable that all of this will happen on a large scale since it is effectively an opportunity for any participant nation to acquire critical minerals without scarring their own landscape.

    This wiki summary probably comes closest to updating the activities and concerns of all parties. The latest meeting about seafloor mining concluded a couple days ago, on July 31st. [4]

    [4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_sea_mining

    EDIT: Here is an update issued days ago about operations on leases near American Samoa. There is no mining activity there at the moment but it could spin up in a short time after sale is finalized. [5]

    [5]https://www.boem.gov/marine-minerals/potential-american-samo...