Marine life in the deep ocean can take decades to recover from the impact of deep-sea mining for rare metals, new research shows.
A study published in the journal Nature found that the site of a deep-sea mining test in 1979 in the North Pacific still showed lower levels of biodiversity – species variety – than neighbouring undisturbed sites 44 years later.
The research was conducted in 2023 and 2024, 5,000 metres below the surface in the Pacific Ocean, in the Clarion-Clipperton zone. This is roughly halfway between Mexico and Hawaii and is a vast, flat and deep region of the ocean floor known as an ‘abyssal plain.’
Read more at: Heriot-Watt University
Nodules on the Pacific Ocean floor. Photo by the National Oceanography Centre. (Photo Credit: National Oceanography Centre and the Trustees of the Natural History Museum, with acknowledgement to the NERC SMARTEX project)
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