]https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/01/20000-feet-under-the-sea/603040/
The long cut short, we are on course to disrupt yet another ecosystem, which we don't even know many details about and who have not been mapped in detail by anybody, but for which current research already indicates importance to the general aquatic and land ecosystem, our biosphere and atmosphere at large, and also our food supply (fish need to eat!)
The code is written in the corporations favor because regulations are difficult in international waters. Money talks. Protective legislation is not bound to happen quickly, and it will probably take for the first disruptive consequences of this to arrive, decades down the line, before this stops, by the time of which the damage will be done, and we won't even have the knowledge to try to reverse the damage and repopulate the habitats.
For the moment, this needs more awarness. Without awarness, we can't do anything including just impact research, about this.
Today, many of the largest mineral corporations in the world have launched underwater mining programs. On the west coast of Africa, the De Beers Group is using a fleet of specialized ships to drag machinery across the seabed in search of diamonds. In 2018, those ships extracted 1.4 million carats from the coastal waters of Namibia; in 2019, De Beers commissioned a new ship that will scrape the bottom twice as quickly as any other vessel. Another company, Nautilus Minerals, is working in the territorial waters of Papua New Guinea to shatter a field of underwater hot springs lined with precious metals, while Japan and South Korea have embarked on national projects to exploit their own offshore deposits. But the biggest prize for mining companies will be access to international waters, which cover more than half of the global seafloor and contain more valuable minerals than all the continents combined.
[...]
At full capacity, these companies expect to dredge thousands of square miles a year. Their collection vehicles will creep across the bottom in systematic rows, scraping through the top five inches of the ocean floor. Ships above will draw thousands of pounds of sediment through a hose to the surface, remove the metallic objects, known as polymetallic nodules, and then flush the rest back into the water. Some of that slurry will contain toxins such as mercury and lead, which could poison the surrounding ocean for hundreds of miles. The rest will drift in the current until it settles in nearby ecosystems. An early study by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences predicted that each mining ship will release about 2 million cubic feet of discharge every day, enough to fill a freight train that is 16 miles long. The authors called this "a conservative estimate," since other projections had been three times as high. By any measure, they concluded, "a very large area will be blanketed by sediment to such an extent that many animals will not be able to cope with the impact and whole communities will be severely affected by the loss of individuals and species."
[...]
"There's a Belgian team in the CCZ doing a component test right now," he said. "They're going to drive a vehicle around on the seafloor and spew a bunch of mud up. So these things are already happening. We're about to make one of the biggest transformations that humans have ever made to the surface of the planet. We're going to strip-mine a massive habitat, and once it's gone, it isn't coming back."
The long cut short, we are on course to disrupt yet another ecosystem, which we don't even know many details about and who have not been mapped in detail by anybody, but for which current research already indicates importance to the general aquatic and land ecosystem, our biosphere and atmosphere at large, and also our food supply (fish need to eat!)
The code is written in the corporations favor because regulations are difficult in international waters. Money talks. Protective legislation is not bound to happen quickly, and it will probably take for the first disruptive consequences of this to arrive, decades down the line, before this stops, by the time of which the damage will be done, and we won't even have the knowledge to try to reverse the damage and repopulate the habitats.
For the moment, this needs more awarness. Without awarness, we can't do anything including just impact research, about this.