Inside the Mission to Chart Atlantic Deep-Sea Life Before Deep-Sea Mining Destroys It

The Atlantic abyss doesn’t look like much, according to scientists. Just mud. Brown muck, endless, chilly, and beyond the reach of any rover’s headlamp. However, after a few minutes of watching the live broadcast from a research vessel, something changes. A transparent worm floats by.

Almost lavender in color, a sea cucumber trudges on the muck as if it had a place. Watching this gives us the impression that the deep ocean is more like a slow, patient metropolis than an empty plain, one that we have been passing by without ever knocking.

The work that is currently taking place across the Atlantic and, more notably, in the Pacific’s Clarion-Clipperton Zone takes place against this unsettling backdrop. Teams from the SMARTEX project and researchers from the Natural History Museum in London are collecting sediment cores, taking pictures of nodule fields, and cataloging species that have never been given names. Over 90% of what they discover may be novel to science. It used to seem like an exaggeration. It no longer does.

There is a sense of urgency from above. Supported by national sponsors, mining corporations seek to collect the metallic nodules—small, blackened chunks of manganese, nickel, cobalt, and copper—scattered throughout the seafloor. the type of metals found in wind turbine magnets and batteries for electric vehicles.

The well-crafted and practiced argument is that they are necessary for the green transition. Quieter but more difficult to reject is the counterargument that we are on the verge of industrializing an ecology that we hardly comprehend.

After years of sorting through decades’ worth of deep-sea archives, Muriel Rabone discovered something disturbing. It came out that a stunning portion of the data—at least a quarter, probably a third—were duplicates. Names are misspelled, records are double-logged, and specimens have inconsistent labels. It seems to be a clerical problem. It isn’t. The process of granting mining permits is directly influenced by diversity estimations. The damage is permitted on paper that doesn’t exactly match the seabed if the baseline is incorrect and the regulation is incorrect.

The images returned from these missions have an odd charm. A purple sea slug with a ribbon-like tail. Silt that hasn’t been touched in millions of years is threaded by hairy worms. Anemones that float on the current are ghostly. As you watch it happen, you can’t help but think of the crew of the HMS Challenger in the 1870s, when they dredged similar nodules onto a wooden deck and thought they had discovered something interesting. They were unaware that the curiosity would eventually be worth trillions of dollars.

Ecologist Andrew Thaler was informed twenty years ago by an industry CEO that commercial deep-sea mining would not occur for ten years. It remains thus. Prospects fail, the law becomes complicated, technology stalls, and new ones emerge. However, the regulatory clock is now running in a new way. There is genuine pressure on the International Seabed Authority to finalize a mining code for cobalt, copper, and nickel. Investors appear to think that this decade will witness the start of extraction. Because the environment continues to show how little we know, scientists remain unsure.

When you read the new studies, you are struck by how modest the science is in comparison to the magnitude of the stakes. While the bulldozers wait outside, researchers are effectively attempting to create the first official guest list for a celebration that has been going on for millions of years. It’s still unclear if that list will ever be completed and if it will make any adjustments. However, there’s a sense that we’re about to make a choice that we can’t undo as we watch the rovers travel across that silent, dark dirt.