Not only that, it also creates an enormous amount of underwater noise which distresses whales and dolphins. Further, it creates plumes of silt and tailings. All of this in a very poorly understood ecosystem. We have no idea what consequences this activity will have.
No sound from a machine can come close to 235dB naval sonar pulses. Cetaceans voices can reach 180dB, 40dB more than a jet taking off. A machine may be annoying to cetaceans but it isn't going to kill them. Silt and tailing plumes made by mining aren't going to come close to the silt dumped into the ocean by rivers or disturbed by submarine landslides.
I say forge ahead and make corrections as we learn more.
The ocean was always a desert, right? No animals ever known to live there, even before we set about industrial scale mining in the name of ecology, so no harm done.
No, surface mining doesn't "suck up and kill seabottom creatures". :)
More sympathetically: yes, surface mining can have habitat loss issues (i.e. land use changes), but the bigger issue erosion and sediment control, the management of which is a major component of any modern mine in a well regulated country. Maybe there are ways to mitigate subsea sediment migration, but they definitely haven't been studied to nearly the same extent as surface issues and mitigations
The sediment migration was part of what was being studied here, so maybe they will mitigate it somewhat. I’m not super optimistic given our mining record on land. Still the deep ocean is mostly a desert, and it’s massive, so I think we can afford to damage it a little. The alternative is land mining, which is also damaging.
It's taking place in 4000m deep abyssal zones. Aside from these nodules, there's barely any flora there and even less fauna. They've got a research vessel trailing them measuring all of the effects, which the researchers will publish in scientific journals.[1]
I think of it as sifting economic value from seafloor cat litter.
No, the alternative is manufacturers paying a dollar more for a battery made using more careful mining processes. Obviously that's a no go, because then I can't sell $3 "one time use" lithium ion battery packs as a "quick charge on the go" and literally throw away a reusable product.
