The Trump administration wants to minimize the sea floor. What does that mean?

Life at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean is slow, dark and calm. Strange creatures with sparkle and glow. Oxygen leaks in mysterious circumstances of mineral rocks. There is little to disturb these deep residents.

“There is a strange life here,” said Bethani Urkut, the geometric world at the Beglo Laboratory.

Search in the depths of the seas is very difficult given the harsh conditions, and rarely given the price.

On Thursday, President Trump signed Executive order This aims to allow, for the first time, industrial mining of the sea price for minerals. Scientists have expressed deep reservations that mining can irreversibly harm these ecosystems in the depths of the seas before their value and actions are completely understood.

What is there anyway?

Sea bottom mining can target three types of metal rich deposits: nodules, scales and hills. But now, everything about nodules. Skills are of special value because they contain minerals used in making electronics, advanced weapons, electric car batteries and other technologies needed for human development. The nodules are also the easiest mineral deposits on the sea floor to collect them.

Economic nodules take millions of years to form, sitting on the sea floor all the time. The nodules are born when it ends with a little material, such as shark teeth, on the ocean floor. Minerals with iron, manganese and other minerals are slowly accumulating like a snowball. The largest is the size of the grapefruit.

Life accumulates on nodules, too. Microbial organisms, invertebrates, coral reefs and sponge all live on nodules, sea stars, crustaceans, worms and other forms of life around them.

Lisa Levin, an ocean designer at the Scripps Institute of Oceanic Sciences, said that about half of the well -known life in vast areas of the sea floor is called the beloved doctrine of these nodules. But “we do not know how widespread species are, or if you have come to one area, there will be individuals who can restore colonialism elsewhere.” “This is an unknown.”

How to spin the sea?

Main approaches for nodule mining are developed. One is basically a claw, abrasion along the sea floor and collecting nodules as is the case. Another is essentially an industrial vacuum for the sea.

In both, nodules will be raised to the ships on the surface, miles away over the ocean floor. The remaining water, rocks and other debris will be dropped to the ocean.

Both drainage and discharge would greatly bother us, if not destroy, the habitat of the sea floor itself. Removing nodules also means removing what scientists believe is the main habitats of living organisms in the easiest plain.

Mining activities will also provide light pollution and noise not only to the sea floor, but also on the surface of the ocean where the ship will be.

Central anxiety are the pillars of deposits that mining will create, whether at the sea floor or “The clearest ocean waters,” said Jeffrey Darazin, an ocean photographer at Hawaii University in Mano. The pillars of sediment, which can travel vast distances, can get rid of life in an unpredictable way.

Fasting can suffocate fish and feed the suffocation candidates such as shrimp and sponge. It can prevent a little light from light in the ocean, preventing the lantern from finding his colleagues and hunter’s thickness from attracting prey. It is full of neglected minerals, there is also an opportunity because it may contaminate the seafood that people eat.

“How possible is our food supply pollution?” Dr. Darazin said. Before the mining begins, “I really want to answer this question. We don’t have one now.”

What do mining companies say?

Mining companies say they are developing sustainable and environmentally friendly approaches in the depths of the seas through research and participation with the scientific community.

Their research included basic studies of sea bottom geology, biology and chemistry, documenting thousands of species and providing deep images and video in the depths of the seas. Dr. Darazin said that interest in mining at the sea bottom was supporting research that may have been difficult to finance otherwise.

The initial tests of recovery equipment provided some ideas about the expected effects of their practices, such as the pillars of sediment, although modeling can only go to predict what can happen once mining reaches a commercial range.

Impossible Metals, a California -based sea -based mining company, develops an underwater robot the size of the shipping container that uses artificial intelligence to deliver nodules without larger living creatures, which claims to reduce the pillars of sediments and biological disorders. Metals, a mining company in the depths of the Canadian seas, succeeded in 2022 to restore approximately 3000 tons of nodules from the sea floor, and collect data on the column and other monuments in this process.

The Minerals Company announced in March that it will seek a permit to minimize the sea bottom through NOAA, and circumvent the international bottom of the sea, a United Nations organization to organize the sea floor mining.

Gerard Baron, CEO of the company, said in an interview on Thursday that the executive order was not “shortening” previous environmental reviews and that the company “has completed more than a decade of environmental research.”

Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said that the United States will adhere to an American law that govern the depths of the seas and commercial activities in American waters and abroad. She said: “Each of these laws requires comprehensive assessments of the environmental impact and compliance with the standard protection standards.”

What are the long -term risks?

Many scientists are still skeptical that enough is known about the environmental effects of the sea steps in the sea mining to move forward. It can only be assumed for long -term consequences.

The authenticity of the lower part of the food chain can have ripples across the ocean environment. An extreme example, as Dr. Darazin said, will be then The sediments reduced the food supply of plankton. In this case, they can starve, unable to dismantle enough organic materials from a cloud of sea dust.

Small plankton is a basic food source, directly or indirectly, for almost every creature in the ocean, and even whales.

Part of the challenge in understanding possible effects is that the pace of life is slow on the sea floor. Fish in the depths of the seas can live hundreds of years. Thousands of coral reefs can live.

“It is a different time scale for life,” said Dr. Levin. “This supports some unknown people about responses to the disorders.” It is difficult for humans to conduct 500 -year experiments to understand whether ecological systems like this can bounce or adapt.

There are no guarantees to restore destructive habitats or reduced damage to the sea floor. Unlike mining on the ground, “We do not have these strategies for the sea of ​​the depths of the seas,” said Dr. Orkut. “There is currently no scientific evidence that we can restore the ecosystem after we have harmed it.”

Some scientists question the need for sea floor mining at all, saying that mines on Earth may meet the increasing demand for minerals.

Supporters of mining in the depths of the seas claimed that their environmental or carbon imprint would be smaller than the traditional mining of these minerals themselves.

“There has been no actual recovery of minerals yet,” said Amy Gartman, a researcher in the ocean that leads the geological minerals team for geological survey, referring to commercial mining. “We compare theoretical mining practices against actual Earth -based practices. If when someone really disappears, we will get a better idea.”

Erik Lipton The reports contributed.