Last spring, in a small conference room at Scripps, a marine biologist who has spent twenty years studying animals that most people will never see kept coming back to the word irreversible. The way scientists say things they wish weren’t true, he said it almost reluctantly. Outside, the Pacific appeared wide, serene, and uncaring as usual. However, something has changed seven miles below that surface. Long regarded as a sort of planetary basement, the Mariana Trench is currently being prepared for industrial extraction.
Silently, the shift picked up speed. An executive order accelerating seabed mineral exploration in international waters was signed by the Trump administration in April of last year. Under a 1980 U.S. statute that most ocean scientists believed had been forgotten, The Metals Company, a contractor closely associated with American defense interests, applied for permits. It hadn’t. Researchers believe that the rush for battery metals, such as nickel, cobalt, and manganese, finally gave Washington the justification it had been waiting for.
Technically, the Trench itself is not being mined. The Clarion-Clipperton Zone and nearby abyssal plains, including areas close to the western Pacific where the Trench starts to slope downward, are the targets. However, the distinction is not as important as the industry would like. Once agitated, sediment plumes can travel hundreds of miles. Even more distance is covered by noise. One Woods Hole scientist described treating the deep ocean’s edges as fair game while maintaining that the center is untouched as a form of accounting fiction because the deep ocean is one continuous system.
It’s simple to forget how little we actually know about this location. Humans have visited the Moon’s surface more often than the bottom of the Trench. Every expedition returns with unnamed species. Only in the past ten years has the translucent sea cucumber known as the “gummy squirrel,” which floats along the seafloor, been described. Additionally, there is the issue of the biotwang, those odd mechanical noises detected by sonar close to the Trench that were eventually linked to a population of Bryde’s whales that no one was aware existed. In the most fundamental sense, we are still discovering things.
It appears that investors think deep-sea mining is unavoidable. The argument is simple: the polymetallic nodules strewn throughout the abyss are theoretically easier to scoop than to excavate from an Indonesian hillside, and the metals required for the energy transition must come from somewhere. There is some merit to the argument. However, it is regarded by many oceanographers as a misinterpretation of timelines. The deep sea may take millions of years to recover after being disturbed, but the metals industry can replenish itself. That language is not rhetorical. Every million years, nodules grow by about a centimeter.
Concerns have not been muted by the American scientific community. There have been letters sent. Testimony was given in Congress. Researchers at NOAA have continued to issue warnings about cascading ecosystem effects despite the agency’s financial constraints. An international moratorium on deep-sea mining has now received support from 37 nations. The United States is not one of them. In practice, the decision has already been made, according to a sense in the field that is more subtly acknowledged in hallways than in press releases.
The public’s reaction once the first mining vessel starts actively extracting nodules is more difficult to predict. The Trench has always had an odd cultural significance that falls somewhere between myth and scientific curiosity. The video of James Cameron’s 2012 solo descent, presented almost mystically, is still making the rounds on the internet. There’s a chance the answer will be loud. It’s also possible that the discussion will already feel scholarly by that point. As we watch this happen, it’s difficult to avoid wondering if we’ll only protect locations once we’ve stopped using them. For now, the scientists continue to write. They continue to converse. And the ocean continues to give its own advice.
