DEEP SEA MINING THREATENS WEIRD, WILD, WONDERFUL, SLOW MOVING LIFE IN THE DEEP SEA
Mining companies seek profitable “polymetallic nodules” that are profitable to mining companies, but deadly to continent-size swaths of ocean.
A conversation with filmmaker and oceans expert Julia Barnes.
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HART HAGAN: You’ve already described some of the impacts of deep-sea mining operations on the creatures who live in the sea, but what else can you share?
JULIA BARNES: A lot of the creatures in the deep sea--for example corals and sponges--are filter feeders. When sediment gets stirred up, even just a little bit of it, it can clog up their feeding system.
For a lot of species it is just going to bury them. It's going to smother them, even if they're not directly in the path of a mining machine, because of all the sediment that's getting stirred up down there, they're going to be impacted, and probably even wiped out.
DEEP SEA LIFE MOVES SLOWLY, GROWS SLOWLY AND IS SLOW TO RECOVER
There was one study called DISCOL that looked at the impacts of simulated deep sea mining. They ran a machine along the bottom of the ocean in an Abyssal Plains region, very similar to the type of mining that they're planning on doing today, and then scientists are going back to have a look at the area 26 years later. They found that the impacted area had not recovered.
Of course, it hasn't recovered.
What they're doing when they mine the deep sea for polymetallic nodules, is they are taking out something that is key habitat. The nodules themselves are very important for the functioning of the deep sea community.
They are often the only hard substrate that organisms can attach to in otherwise very muddy and silty sediment environments but they also are communities in and of themselves.
POLYMETALLIC NODULES ARE HABITAT FOR MYRIAD LIFE FORMS
The mining operations are looking for polymetallic nodules, which are very porous. They have about 60 percent porosity. The surface area inside a polymetallic nodule can be equivalent to up to like two football fields worth of surface area.
And on that surface area, you've got these communities of microbes that are much more dense and much more diverse than what exists in the surrounding sediment or in the surrounding water. It's a really different community that lives inside a nodule.
They help sequester carbon out of the seawater and lock it away into the sediment beneath them. They perform a redox reaction, using some of the metals in polymetallic nodules. There's also an exchange of nutrients, and the polymetallic nodules help to balance the nutrient contents of the water around them. They also balance the acidity of the water around them.
So they perform all these functions that make the deep-sea livable to the incredible array of species who live there.
THE WEIRD AND WONDERFUL CREATURES IN THE DEEP SEA
I want to take a second right now and talk about how beautiful life is in the deep sea. The companies that want to mine the deep ocean describe it as a lifeless desert.
That couldn't be further from the truth. It is full of the most weird and wonderful species that you can imagine. I really encourage anyone who's watching this interview to just Google some videos of life in the Abyssal Plains regions of the ocean, or just in the deep sea in general or look up images. Look up videos if you can. They're just spectacularly beautiful.
A lot of the species in the deep sea utilize bioluminescence. They create their own light in order to be able to communicate with each other, to attract prey, or to evade predators. So they look really different. There's a lot of translucent species as well. There are creatures with really huge mouths and sharp teeth. They're creepy looking but also adorable in a way.
The sharks in the deep sea look so different from sharks that you would see on land. There's one called a frilled shark, which is probably my favorite deep-sea species. I love sharks but it has a face that looks a lot like a snake and snakes are my favorite land animals. They're just so adorable and they've got these big green eyes that almost look like they're glowing.
HART HAGAN: One thing that's interesting is that in this deep sea world, temperatures are lower and therefore metabolism is slower and therefore animals live longer. So it takes longer for that type of biological community to recover if it's disturbed, longer than you would expect in warmer temperatures.
JULIA BARNES: There's so much life in the deep sea. There's all the species that you expect to find in the ocean, except they're in these weird forms that you'd never see, and weird colors that you'd never see normally.
And then there's more species that we can't even imagine. Every time scientists go into the ocean, they're finding new species. Like 80% of the species they come across are ones that they've never seen before. There's just an amazing diversity of life In the deep sea.