by Scientists who apply to the recent efforts to issue international rules for deep-sea mining say that it is unclear whether it is possible to restore damaged ecosystems in the sea floor-or how long it would take.
The sea floor, one of the last wild zones on the planet, is a coveted border for companies and countries that want to access minerals that are highly asked for emerging technologies such as electric cars.
Potato nodes that contain cobalt, nickel, copper and manganese, which are available on the sea floor in the central Pacific.
Companies that want to put on these polymetallic nodules say that they can do this with a minimal risk of the deep sea environment.
But Ocean Defenders fought against what they consider as the emergence of an industry that threaten the isolated ecosystems that are not yet well understood.
This threat was underlined by European scientists who were presented this week on the sidelines of a meeting in Kingston, Jamaica of the International Sea Board Authority, who tried to complete the future rules for marine floor cuts.
“When we remove nodules from the sea floor, we don’t know what we lose, just that it is lost forever,” was one of the conclusions of deep calm, a research project for the sea floor.
The deep rest study warned of using sea floor restoration “as a management measure for affected habitats”.
“So far, all the restoration operations that we tried within our Deep Rest project have been at short notice. And what we observed is that the ecosystems do not recover in the given time,” said Jozee Sarrazin, researcher at the French Institute for Ocean Science or Ifremer.
“If the restoration is possible, it takes a very long time, and at the moment we do not have the data to say whether this will take 100 or 1000 years,” the Deep Rast coordinator told AFP.
Despite the pressure, the cold, total darkness and lack of nutritional sources on the bottom of the ocean, it is full of life.
The number of species that live on the deep sea floor is not yet known, but estimated in the millions.
– soft corals, sea anemone –
Wide parts of the Pacific Ocean, in which polymetallic nodules find protective fauna such as sponges, soft corals or sea anemones.
The fauna “only exists in these areas because they need the hard substrate of the node,” said Matthias Haeckel from the German Research Center Geomar, which contained the results of the MiningImpact project in Kingston this week.
The vacuuming of these nodules and the spread of sediment to the affected areas reduces the population density, the biological diversity and the functioning of ecosystems, as the study by MiningiMpact has determined.
“In the end, we will talk about the recovery times of thousands of years,” said Haeckel. The nodules themselves form over millions of years.
Some research work on recovery efforts are underway, but the results are not yet in.
“We designed artificial nodules from deep -seaeton and set them up at various locations” at depths of around 4,500 meters (14,700 feet), Sabine Gollner, biologist at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research said AFP.
“But if you take into account the slow growth rates in the deep sea, the slow processes, it will take a few more years to find out whether the restoration is effective and to what extent,” she said.
Massive sulfide deposits-a kind of mineral deposit in underwater openings, which are spit on sea water heated sea water, the researchers suggest.
These types of underwater geysers are full of amazing and unique biological diversity.
“When we extract massive sulfides near active ventilation slots, we know what we lose and we have to prevent loss,” says the study on the deep rest.
According to Gollner, however, it would be good to integrate restoration goals into the mining code, which is negotiated by the member states of the international marine floor authority.
“It is good to record it, but with a clear statement that it cannot be taken into account at this moment not to achieve agreed environmental goals,” she said.
“For example, an contractor should not use this argument to reduce a larger area.”
ABD/KSB/AKS
