A U.S. federal agency is considering allowing companies to lease more than 45.7 million hectares (113 million acres) of waters off Alaska for seabed mining. Alaska is the latest of several places President Donald Trump has sought to open to the fledging industry over the past year, including waters around American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Like those Pacific islands, Alaska is home to Indigenous peoples with ancestral ties to the ocean, and the proposal is raising cultural and environmental concerns. Deep-sea mining, the practice of scraping minerals off the ocean floor for commercial products like electric vehicle batteries and military technology, is not yet a commercial industry. It’s been slowed by the lack of regulations governing permits in international waters and by concerns about the environmental impact of extracting minerals that formed over millions of years. Scientists have warned the practice could damage fisheries and fragile ecosystems that could take millennia to recover. Indigenous peoples have also pushed back, citing violations of their rights to consent to projects in their territories. Trump, however, has voiced strong support for the industry as part of his effort to make the United States a leader in critical mineral production. He has also pushed for U.S. companies to mine in international waters, bypassing ongoing global negotiations over international mining regulations. Kate Finn, a citizen of the Osage Nation and executive director of the Tallgrass Institute Center for Indigenous Economic Stewardship in Colorado, said she worries the seabed mining industry will repeat the…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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Sea bed mining is an incoming disaster. It's super tempting for mining companies because the sea floor is riddled with surface level minerals, already in convenient nodules that could be picked up. Look at videos of prospective locations and you'll understand. Miles and miles of flat sea bed with spherical nodules of rare metals just sitting there, practically begging to be picked up. Not hard to see why that would make magnates start salivating.
It was first assumed that any disturbtion to the sea floor would be minimal and it would recover quickly. So we did a study in the 70's or 80's where we mined a small area. To this day, that area hasn't recovered at all. Images from when they finished and now are identical. The sea floor does NOT recover. At least not on a human timescale.
Unfortunately, the reaction to this study showing that any mining would cause irreversible damage was a collective shrug from mining companies as they're all moving ahead with their plans anyways. They already made their decision, and there is nowhere near enough opposition to stop them.