As prospect of unregulated deep-sea mining looms, scientists sound the alarm

A high-stakes effort to hash out environmental regulations governing mining of the seabed in international waters ended without agreement last week, after negotiators missed a July deadline. The lack of progress by the International Seabed Authority (ISA) raises an alarming prospect, observers say: that mining operations targeting metals needed by the electric vehicle industry could commence without effective regulations in place. “The ISA has just passed into uncharted territory,” says Matthew Gianni, a policy adviser for the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition who attended the meeting in Kingston, Jamaica. It’s a situation that could put the health of deep-sea ecosystems at risk—especially because so much remains unknown. “It will take a long time to really understand the biodiversity,” says Patricia Esquete Garrote, a marine ecologist and taxonomist with the University of Aveiro. Much of the discussion has centered on a remote region of the eastern Pacific Ocean called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), which stretches from south of Hawaii to Mexico. Four kilometers down, the sea floor in the region is dotted with trillions of polymetallic nodules that are estimated to contain more cobalt and nickel than all known land deposits . Companies hope to mine the nodules by sucking them into bus-size seafloor mining machines and pumping them to the surface. But many living things have an earlier claim on the ancient nodules: They...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news