The race to mine the bottom of the ocean

Wow it’s almost counter intuitive that our quest for raw material to solve the climate crisis would lead to a chain of detrimental impacts to our marine seabed.

I personally have experience conducting research using polymetallic nodule samples provided by The Metals Company, so let me come out and say there are so many different facets in which this could harm the deep-sea ecosystem, many in which most people fail to understand or even think of. My work focused on the small animals (nematodes & copepods) that inhabit the folds and crevices on the nodules themselves, and most of the current research shows that they are vital habitats for these organisms, which of course are a foundation of the food-web in deep-sea communities. Mining will undoubtedly destroy virtually every single aspect of these ecosystems for multiple decades; entire communities dead bottom to top.

Vox is really good at finding these weird topics that no one knows about but yet are incredibly interesting

Nauru's land was almost completely destroyed due to phosphate mining, it's tragic seeing exactly the same devastation about to be unleashed on the ocean also.

If anyone has looked at the mining machines that go underwater, it looks exactly like the Spice Harvester's from Dune. Life really does imitate fiction at times.

Fantastic coverage, animation, and explanation! Thanks, Vox!

On top of the biologic disruption of the benthos, there are also concerns that mining will allow carbon stored in deep sea sediments to be reintroduced into the atmosphere. It is important to keep in mind that the ocean is the largest carbon sink.

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It's worth mentioning that another Canadian company called Impossible Metals is developing a low impact method for extracting these nodules that doesn't rely on giant robotic vacuums crawling across the sea floor, swallowing up and burying everything in their path under a huge plume of dust. Impossibel Metals have developed an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) that will hover over the seabed instead of crawling over it and uses machine vision and AI to identify and pick up specific nodules (and just the nodules) using robotic manipulator arms. The system uses a buoyancy engine to remain aloft, so it won't kick up literal tons of sediment so it can pick up the nodules and leave the surrounding environment untouched. Imagine you have a ton of dandelions in your yard that you want to get rid of. One way to do it would be to take a lawnmower and level everything in your yard. You'll get the dandelions, but you cut everything else in the process. That would be like the extraction method you mentioned in the video. The new system would be akin to a few people going out into the yard, each with a pair of scissors, cutting the dandelions and leaving the rest untouched. Unfortunately, there's no way to extract any kind of natural resources from anywhere on the planet that won't have some sort of impact on the environment, but at least there are smarter, lower impact ways to do it, that may also help us fight climate change. We need to incentivize using these methods, even when they're slower or more expensive than wasteful or more damaging practices.

Living in the 50s must have been so nice with how ignorant we all were to environmental impact. “Oh! Wanna mine? Yes! Let’s make lots of money and build stuff to help society!”

The world needs these metals. Its between hurting the sea and having the world burn. Ill pick horrific sea damage over climate change any day.

that was so informational. I bet it took a lot of time to research and create this video. Thank you so much! I will be sharing this information with my middle school students!

As an enviromental scientist (my day job as it were), this is one of the many "rock and a hard place" scenarios we run into. Obviously, electric cars are not the solution, we really need public transit not cars, but we still need much more batteries to not use fossil fuels reguardless. China is in one of the worst spots in this problem, as need the green energy sector for their economy, and thus need metals, but getting those metals will utterly destroy already very depleted wild seafood stocks, an essential protein that the country has been economically and culturally reliant on for thousands of years. Because of economic incentives, deep sea mining will almost certainly happen (regulated and legal or not), so most likely we will have to prepare for major seafood shortages in the future, and potentially millions of deaths due to malnourisment.

Considering that 70% of the surface area of our planet is ocean, it follows that most of the world is seabed and that perhaps most of its inhabitants live there. Many climate systems rely on ocean currents and the giantness of the ocean to work. Life itself exists because of water and the ocean. Let's hope we don't dig too deep, as I'm sure it is inevitable someone(s) will start digging, and probably already have in other areas.

Thank you for this eye opener. This just a bit unsettling to know how these companies will go above and beyond to get their way, regardless of the long term consequences we’ll end up paying for.

I donated today for the first time to a YouTube contributor VOX because I believe in the journalism principles and hard work being dedicated to educating the world on issues we simply don't have time or the resources to investigate ourselves. Thank you. VOX team and keep up the good work.

I don't know how mining regulations are always so loose. One solution could be to have strict regulations regarding the extraction, so first plooms are minimized, noise and light emissions of the operations are regulated.. I mean we will permanently erase certain species through this still but also keep others alive. I think it is also naive to think that rare metals are primarily mined to efficiently prevent a climate crisis, so there has to be regulation that sets that as a clear target

If the past is prologue, this could be an unmitigated ecological disaster.

I research deep-sea coral communities and this is devastating. Corals love hard substrates like rocks to live on so this could have horrific impacts. Benthic communities are full of life that is completely destroyed when a giant dulldozer comes In to scoop rocks (but realistically everything) up.

Imagine a company could give a deadline to an international coalition.