A new opinion piece suggests that deep-sea mining would generate damaging sediment plumes and noise pollution that would negatively affect the midwater column, a critical ocean ecosystem that begins ...

To meet growing demand for critical minerals, particularly those vital for clean energy technologies, some mining companies have proposed to extract them from the seafloor. In understanding the ...

Deep-sea mining would, therefore, affect not only animal communities on the seafloor but also those in the overlying water column, known as midwater. Since there is usually little sediment in the ...

An experiment revealed that clouds of sediment disturbed by exploratory mining equipment on the seafloor tend to flow in dense sediment-laden currents that largely remain confined to an area only a ...

Nauru Ocean Resources Inc. (NORI) has begun sharing emerging data on impacts of seafloor sediment plumes one year on from its 2022 test mining campaign. Building upon earlier laboratory predictions ...

Amid a gold rush to mine the seafloor for valuable minerals, scientists from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and colleagues conducted ...

What will be the impact to the ocean if humans are to mine the deep sea? It’s a question that’s gaining urgency as interest in marine minerals has grown. The ocean’s deep-sea bed is scattered with ...

In certain parts of the deep ocean, scattered across the seafloor, lie baseball-sized rocks layered with minerals accumulated over millions of years. A region of the central Pacific, called the ...

A recent article in Nature Communications described a polymetallic nodule collector trial at 4500 m depth. A gravity current ...

Scientists measured a sediment plume stirred up by a protoype of a deep-sea-mining vehicle to help gauge the impact of such vehicles if they are used to mine minerals like nickel and cobalt. The ...