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Why I attended a deep sea mining workshop

Far beneath the relatively flat surface of the open sea, there lies one of the last great unexplored wildernesses on earth. These environments are often used as practice sites in the search for extraterrestrial life because the creatures that live in these dark, crushing depths may have more in common with other planets than the parts of our own we are familiar with.

Due to our increased demand for rare metals in smartphones and solar panels, these previously ignored tracts of land are increasingly being explored for mining operations. From our experiences in land mining over the last few thousand years, we know that there is a whole suite of issues that this action creates - noise, dust, toxic waste. It's obvious that this will cause an immediate local problem to any nearby abyssal life, but it's not clear just how permanent and far-reaching these consequences will be. Will life in these regions recover quickly enough that it won't make any difference or be decimated and lost forever? We just don't know enough to be able to say either way. Partly this is because we know so very little about the life (microbial and otherwise) in these environments to begin with and how they might react to such large and unexpected changes. This is also such a new technology that the rules are still being written so it's hard to know sometimes even what questions are the right ones to ask, never mind trying to predict what effects these might have.

However, because the rules are still being written there is the opportunity to make a real difference in shaping how this industry will operate, to help strike a balance between our need for resources now, controlling damaging effects and preserving the regions that would otherwise be lost before we even know their true value.

So, this week I attended a two-day workshop on this timely topic, with the intended result of collating what we as deep subsurface microbiologists know and identifying important knowledge gaps. There are drafts of a series of informed and evidence-based recommendations for the decision makers on this topic in the pipeline already, so stay tuned.

Further information:

Sky news documentary

BBC news clip

Article on exploring the deep for Blue Planet II