Parts of the ocean floor are littered with potato-sized lumps that contain a mix of metals and rare earth minerals needed to make military defense systems, electric vehicle batteries, smart phones and some medical devices.
“You can see them with the naked eye. They’re not buried, although they are attached to the seabed," says Rebecca Loomis, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. Her organization is worried about recent interest in mining these polymetallic nodules. She fears environmental damage from new technologies needed to work more than 3 miles below the surface.
“Pretty much every time scientists go down there, they discover new species, which tells you how much we don’t know, and these species are important ecologically, and they also could be important for scientific breakthroughs," Loomis says.
"A potent cancer treatment has been developed based on a deep-sea sponge for example, and so when you mine you could be destroying species down there without even understanding what scientific value they might have or what role they might play in the broader ocean ecosystem.”
Companies have also expressed interest in mining heavy-mineral sands off Virginia’s coast. Loomis says a company called Odyssey Marine Exploration has already asked to lease land for that purpose. Opponents say it would be better to get the needed materials by recycling old electronics and batteries, but the Trump administration is fast-tracking approval for deep sea mining instead.
