Deep-sea Mining Could Threaten Sea Life, Climate — and Us.

A planned mining method to gather critical minerals from the seafloor would create sediment plumes higher up in the water column where many creatures live.

By , Ph.D. Candidate in Biological Oceanography, University of Hawaii

A cnidarian is attached to a dead sponge stalk on a manganese nodule in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. Diva Amon and Craig Smith, University of Hawaii at Mānoa

Picture an ocean world so deep and dark it feels like another planet — where creatures glow and life survives under crushing pressure.

This is the , a hidden ecosystem that begins 650 feet (200 meters) below the ocean surface and sustains life across our planet. It includes the twilight zone and the midnight zone, where strange and delicate animals thrive in the near absence of sunlight. Whales and commercially valuable fish such as tuna rely on animals in this zone for food. But this unique ecosystem faces an unprecedented threat.

As the demand for electric car batteries and smartphones grows, mining companies are turning their , where precious metals such as nickel and cobalt can be found in potato-size nodules sitting on the ocean floor.