#NPR: The U.S. takes a step toward allowing #mining on the ocean floor, a fragile #ecosystem

by Julia Simon, April 25, 2025

"President #Trump signed an executive order Thursday aimed at making it easier for companies to mine the deep seafloor, saying it would create 'a robust domestic supply for critical minerals.'

"There is currently no commercial-scale deep-sea mining anywhere in the world. But companies have long eyed the ocean floor as a potential source of metals like nickel, cobalt, manganese and copper, which are used in batteries for electric vehicles and other technologies.

"The world has no rulebook for deep-sea mining. One company is pushing forward anyway

"These metals can be found in potato-sized nodules lying on the ocean floor. Many of the nodules are in the middle of the Pacific ocean, beyond the legal territory of individual countries.

"Thursday's order might circumvent ongoing international negotiations to regulate deep-sea mining.

"Those regions have traditionally been overseen by an international organization, the #InternationalSeabedAuthority (#ISA). The ISA has hosted talks for years to try to hammer out a rulebook to govern a potential seabed mining industry. The U.S. did not ratify the treaty that governs the seabed, and is not a voting member of the ISA, though in the past under previous administrations it has respected the ISA process.

"In his executive order, Trump instructed federal agencies to expedite the process for reviewing and issuing permits for mining on the seafloor in both U.S. and international territory. It will use a U.S. law from 1980, the "#DeepSeabed Hard Mineral Resources Act."

"Scientists and environmental groups condemned the order, arguing that opening the deep seabed for mining could disrupt important marine ecosystems, and damage the fishing industry.

" 'This is being planned on some of the least resilient #ecosystems on the planet,' says Douglas McCauley, professor of ocean science at the University of California Santa Barbara. 'It would have #catastrophic biological consequences.'

"Underwater mining can create plumes of sediment that could suffocate marine life, and degrade the #FoodWebs that fish depend on, McCauley says.

"There are also important questions about whether we actually need to be mining the seabed to get enough of these minerals for technologies like batteries, says Micah Ziegler, assistant professor of energy and chemical systems at Georgia Institute of Technology.

"While a couple of years ago researchers were concerned about the limitations of land-based mining for metals like cobalt and nickel, a variety of alternative #battery chemistries have been developed that might reduce the need for those elements, Ziegler says."

Read more:
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/25/nx-s1-5376482/trump-seabed-mining-executive-order

#OceansAreLife #MarineLife #DeepSeaMining #NoDeepSeaMining
#DarkOxygen #LifeOnEarth #Extinction #Nodules #Greenwashing #CorporateColonialism #CorporatePolluters #TrumpSucks #Idiocracy
#BatteryAlternatives #NoCobaltMining #RecycleCopper #RecycleCobalt #RecycleZinc #Recycle! #Ecocide #PlanetDestroyers #HumanGreed #NoJobsOnADeadPlanet

#Oxygen produced in the #DeepSea raises questions about extraterrestrial life

"Over 12,000 feet below the surface of the sea, in a region of the Pacific Ocean known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (#CCZ), million-year-old rocks cover the seafloor. These rocks may seem lifeless, but nestled between the nooks and crannies on their surfaces, tiny sea creatures and microbes make their home, many uniquely adapted to life in the dark.

"These deep-sea rocks, called polymetallic #nodules, don't only host a surprising number of sea critters. A team of scientists that includes Boston University experts has discovered they also produce oxygen on the seafloor.

"The discovery is a surprise considering oxygen is typically created by plants and organisms with help from the sun -- not by rocks on the ocean floor. About half of all the oxygen we breathe is made near the surface of the ocean by phytoplankton that photosynthesize just like land-dwelling plants. Since the sun is needed to carry out photosynthesis, finding oxygen production at the bottom of the sea, where there is no light, flips conventional wisdom on its head. It was so unexpected that scientists involved in the study first thought it was a mistake.

"This was really weird, because no one had ever seen it before," says Jeffrey Marlow, a BU College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of biology and coauthor on the study, which was published in Nature Geoscience.

As an expert in microbes that live in the most extreme habitats on Earth -- like hardened lava and deep-sea hydrothermal vents -- Marlow initially suspected that microbial activity could be responsible for making oxygen. The research team used deep-sea chambers that land on the seafloor and enclose the seawater, sediment, polymetallic nodules, and living organisms. They then measured how oxygen levels changed in the chambers over 48 hours. If there are plentiful organisms breathing oxygen, then the levels would normally decline, depending on how much animal activity is present in the chamber. But in this case, oxygen was increasing.

" 'We did a lot of troubleshooting and found that the oxygen levels increased many more times following that initial measurement,' Marlow says. 'So we're now convinced it's a real signal.'

"He and his colleagues were aboard a research vessel tasked with learning more about the ecology of the CCZ, which spans 1.7 million square miles between #Hawaii and #Mexico, for an environmental survey sponsored by The Metals Company, a deep-sea mining firm interested in extracting the rocks en masse for metals. After running experiments on board the vessel, Marlow and the team, led by Andrew Sweetman at the Scottish Association for Marine Science, concluded the phenomenon isn't primarily caused by microbial activity, despite the abundance of many different types of microbes both on and inside the rocks.

"#PolymetallicNodules are made of rare metals, including #copper, nickel, cobalt, iron, and manganese, which is why companies are interested in mining them. It turns out, according to the study, that those densely packed metals are likely triggering "seawater electrolysis." This means that metal ions in the rock layers are distributed unevenly, creating a separation of electrical charges -- just like what happens inside of a battery. This phenomenon creates enough energy to split water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen. They named this "dark oxygen," since it's oxygen made with no sunlight. What remains unclear is the exact mechanism of how this happens, if oxygen levels vary across the CCZ, and if the oxygen plays a significant role in sustaining the local ecosystem."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/08/240826182909.htm