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Politics : The Exxon Free Environmental Thread
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From: S. maltophilia12/6/2025 12:42:22 PM
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What Scientists Found When a Deep Sea Mining Company Invited Them In
An ocean-mining company has funded some of the most comprehensive scientific studies to date, and peer-reviewed results have begun to emerge.

.....Seabed mining involves reaching deep into the ocean with an autonomous vehicle to harvest nodules from the seabed floor and pump them up to a ship on the surface for processing. During a mining test that scientists studied in 2022, The Metals Company brought up 3,000 tons of nodules from the seafloor, a fraction of the 1.5 million tons it plans to collect during its first year of commercial operation.

The process creates two kinds of plumes of sediment that can alter the ecosystem. One plume comes from disposing the excess sediment carried to the surface with the mineral nodules as they are transported up to a mining ship. The other involves the clouds kicked up on the seafloor as the vehicle rolls across the soft sediment.

During their test, The Metals Company released the excess sediment 1,200 meters under the waves. Scientists from the University Hawaii funded by The Metals Company found that releasing the sediment at this level dilutes the food supply of the zooplankton and small squid.

This could “potentially starve the food web,” said Michael Dowd, a doctoral student at the University of Hawaii who led the study, which was published last month in Nature Communications. “These animals also serve as a food source for deep diving top predators that are important in commercial fisheries, such as tuna.”....

nytimes.com
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