Hacker News Reader

Comment by bpx51 | Hacker News Reader

While I can't vouch for this study's accuracy, deep-sea mining companies will find a way to discredit any research that opposes their interests. Marine ecosystems are already under significant stress, and these mining operations will certainly accelerate the damage that's already happening.

View on HN

This is true. Commercial interests have been waiting for the day when they could start mining the seafloors globally for these nodules. I was in college ~40 years ago and it was a topic of discussion back then. The technology to conduct the seafloor mining was not available though everyone knew that the day would come when it became feasible if industry required these minerals. Someone would work on solving the problems of access and recovery. The processing part was already done.

No one wondered how it would disturb the seafloor since so little was known about the deep sea environment back then.

The nodules were going to be the answer to mineral shortages that would naturally occur as you deplete all the economically recoverable deposits in your own country or as deposits in friendly countries become unavailable due to geopolitical changes. Countries that have little mineral wealth of their own but do have a coastline that gives them access to deep water could benefit by opening their offshore areas to seafloor mining.

I think the discovery or the notion that oxygen could be produced in the deep sea by processes acting on or with these nodules is not unusual. Extremophile organisms able to live in anoxic conditions in total darkness on the seafloor should surprise no one. It also should surprise no one that some of the organisms may have evolved to produce oxygen as a by-product of their interaction with mineralized rocks.

It's a big ole beautiful world out there and we don't understand a lot about it. It seems unlikely that in 4.5 billion years nothing has evolved to fill that niche. Personally I think it's bacteria all the way down.

> Commercial interests have been waiting for the day when they could start mining the seafloors globally for these nodules.

For all the folks thinking about Project Azorian[0], I recently read "Blind Man's Bluff"[1] and recommend it for the larger context of oceanic subsurface reconnaissance.

0. https://www.cia.gov/legacy/museum/exhibit/project-azorian/

1. https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Mans-Bluff-Submarine-Espionage/...

Speaking of book recommendations, Pulitzer-winning author Richard Powers wrote a terrific (Booker-nominated) novel about the ocean, "Playground"[0].

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playground_(novel)

You wrote: "No one wondered how it would disturb the seafloor since so little was known about the deep sea environment back then."

The "Sealab 2020" cartoon show had an episode about this in 1972 (so, over 50 years ago): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealab_2020 "7 "Where Dangers Are Many" October 21, 1972 Sealab crew investigates a disturbance to find an automatic bottom-dredging mining operation in their area. The captain of the operation, Samuel Carlson, becomes trapped under his dredge and is rescued by Sealab. While Carlson is decompressing after having received medical attention at Sealab, the crew manage to convince him to allow them 24 hours to demonstrate how to mine less destructively."

Available here: https://archive.org/details/sealab-2020-the-complete-series

Specifically: https://archive.org/download/sealab-2020-the-complete-series...

One issue though: in the episode, the Sealab 2020 crew were worried about damage to sealife as a byproduct of mining. They were OK with removing the nodules if they could be done without causing significant seafloor disturbance. But it sounds like removing the nodules might by itself harm sealife by depriving sealife of oxygen.

Another theme in the episode is the need for a person in the loop to guide the dredging machine to do less damage -- compared to a fully automated system the owner was so proud of investing in. Interesting to think about given the push to AI these days.

I watched Sealab 2020 at the time as a kid and very much enjoyed it and saw these characters as role models. I very much dreamed back then of leading such a lab when 2020 rolled around (like a "Paul" character did in the cartoon). Heartbreaking in 2001 to see "Sealab 2021" make fun of all this hopefulness for the future and the environment -- when I was hoping for a good sequel building on the Sealab 2020 values.

Sadly, my own plans from the 1980s to make Sealab-like habitats in the oceans, in outer space, and elsewhere never got very far (yet):

https://pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

https://pdfernhout.net/sunrise-sustainable-technology-ventur...

https://kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

Thanks for clarifying the state of understanding of seafloor processes back then. Of all the stuff I typed in that post I knew that would be the part that would draw a correction from the crowd. I appreciate your input and now that you remind me, I actually remember watching these Sealab cartoons. A lot of water under my bridge since then.

According to the article, this new discovery(?) actually go _against_ their interest.

Either that, or lots of missing links and details...

Indeed which is why they are discrediting it ;)

There isn’t a smoking gun that some specific dire consequence will happen from deep sea mining but it fits with Greenpeace’s argument that we have little understanding of the deep ocean and there could be consequences.

Sure there could be consequences. That literally applies to basically everything. So I don't buy that argument. You really need to quantify in some sense what the consequences could be and how likely they are.

As I understand it very very likely to cause dead zones. Ignoring the role these nodules play, the way I understand the mining works is it has huge combines crawling the ocean floor and kicking up huge plumes of dust to extract out the nodules. This:

A) kills all marine life that might be present on the ocean floor which is a huge disruption to a fragile ecosystem where everything is even more tightly interconnected

B) disorients and kills marine life in large area through the massive dust clouds that get created by the combined kicking up that dust

The problem with putting the onus on those concerned with this activity is it’s completely backwards. The risk is great enough that we don’t want profit driven activity going full steam to try to manifest those risks first and try to deal with consequences later. There is reasonable concern that this will cause huge disruptions to the ecosystem even before we get to the potential that these modules are why there’s oxygen down there to begin with.

Very little life exists at the ocean floor, since there are very few life sustaining resources there.

That means that killing that life in an area has very little effect of the rest of the ocean eco system.

The mining is a one time event, and once it's completed in an area, life will return, and that eco system will be as it was.

I live in a city. Building it destroyed some wilderness to give half a million people somewhere to live. I think that was a very good thing.

> Very little life exists at the ocean floor, since there are very few life sustaining resources there.

You are making such a confident definitive statement about a part of our earth that is less accessible than outer space. Absence of evidence is decidedly not an evidence of absence here. We barely understand anything about the ocean floor and the deep ocean around it. We should not be going full steam with industrialization until we have a better grasp of how things work there. This is a once way gate where on the other end of it could be the consequential equivalent of just having a nuclear war.

Think about it this way - until recently people believed there was no oxygen in the deep ocean. That’s clearly not true. And they thought there was no life but if I recall correctly there actually is or at least is a good reason to believe there might be and reason to believe it’s critical in the overall cycle supporting all the other life that lives in the deep ocean.

> I live in a city. Building it destroyed some wilderness to give half a million people somewhere to live. I think that was a very good thing.

This is likely going to be the point of disagreement. Depending on where someone falls in the spectrum, their beliefs can range anywhere from humans are bad and should die to protecting and growing human life at all costs.

Not to mention, you could build up instead of out and get more or less the same results with less disruption to natural ecosystems

True. And to me, as a human, the "humans are bad" crowd are an enemy and need to be fought and defeated.

Mostly that crowd is just concerned with humans' tendency to shoot ourselves in the foot when we don't understand something.

There used to be this place called the "fertile crescent" where humans grew a lot of food. But they didn't understand how certain irrigation techniques caused salt to build up in the soil, so they accidentally turned it into a desert.

We don't understand this oxygen source in the deep ocean. It seems likely that we're, again, about to shoot ourselves in the foot.

The belief is not that humans are evil, it's that humans are unskilled in dangerous ways and that it's worth slowing down to cultivating those skills before we cause unnecessary harm to ourselves.

This is more or less my view. However, when I say the "humans are bad" group, I mean the people basing their decisions purely on emotion or virtue and who are usually incapable of coming up with such a nuanced view. The same goes for the other extreme.

Humans aren’t bad in moderation. But 8 billion of us, and growing, consuming ever more resources, are pretty objectively bad.

So you think certain humans are bad.

> Very little life exists at the ocean floor, since there are very few life sustaining resources there.

I think that this isn't true even in light of our current known science; but our understanding of what "life sustaining resources" are is something that can only grow with time—certainly we've often found in the past life in places that we thought were utterly inhospitable to it—and so we cannot meaningfully say that little life exists for this reason. And it can be dangerous to sacrifice life even when we think we understand it very well, unless we are sure that we completely understand its role in the ecosystem, or, rather, how its removal from one part of the ecosystem will affect our part of the ecosystem—which we (almost?) definitely don't.

We've explored the deep ocean. Far from every spot, but enough to know the big picture. There is some life there but not much. Because there is very little resources to sustain life. It's pretty much just whatever scraps fall down from near the surface.

Now, of course mining the sea floor will disrupt the local eco systems. It might take decades or longer for those to heal. To me that's fine in the big picture.

A big exception is underwater volcanoes, which have enormously vibrant eco systems, and may even be where life on Earth originated. This is because the volcanoes supply tons of heat energy and minerals. No one is thinking of mining those.

Either way, this video is quite informative, and doesn't even fully agree with me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFaWgAXax1Q&ab_channel=60Min...

> We've explored the deep ocean. Far from every spot, but enough to know the big picture. There is some life there but not much. Because there is very little resources to sustain life. It's pretty much just whatever scraps fall down from near the surface.

26.1% of the ocean floor is mapped. By comparison, 100% of the Moon surface and 99% of the Mars surface is mapped. Less than 5% of the ocean has actually been seen by humans. I don't know what makes you think we have enough to know the big picture, but to me that seems like a very small portion. And certainly not enough to really understand the lifecycle that's going on down there.

You're technically right, of course.

And one example of your point is when people first took a look at underwater volcanoes a few decades ago and found worlds of life no one had even imagined.

Then again, on a practical level, any ocean floor area humanity might mine would be carefully studied beforehand. That's needed to know where and how to mine, if nothing else.

So I'll claim that anywhere we'd mine we'd have a very good view of what life would be affected how. There could still be a Martian UFO base on the ocean floor 20 miles away, of course, but that wouldn't be affected.

> Then again, on a practical level, any ocean floor area humanity might mine would be carefully studied beforehand. That's needed to know where and how to mine, if nothing else.

And if they discover life you're thinking they'll stop the mining? Or will your next argument be "Oh but actually that's not a lot of life" or "it's OK if that life dies out".

This is a very wise quote that applies to relying on good faith actions:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

From another commentor:

> 1. There is a lot of animal life in the deep ocean where these modules are present and absent where they are not

So it's pretty clear if anything that today we already know these nodules are likely relevant to deep ocean life in some way we don't fully understand yet.

I 100% think the mining should go ahead even if it destroys some life!

Without destroying life we can't even eat. That's an impossible standard. We could have no mines on land either, not to mention cities or farms. When morality becomes a suicide pact, I'm out!

If the mining would destroy a large eco system forever, then I'm OK with not doing it. It's easy to have others than the mining corporation making these decisions. It's not a new problem for undersea mining.

I wanted to give this comment some careful thought. My challenge with your position is that no one, or at least certainly not me, has claimed the standard as negatively impacting any life. The standard is "will this spiral out into an ecological disaster" and right now the evidence suggests that we don't know enough to suggest it won't. If you allow some industrialization, then there's more and more economic pressure to scale it up regardless of the safety impacts.

It's also extremely dramatic to call this a suicide pact. The impact of not mining the sea floor is that we increase mining & pay a little bit more for obtaining these resources in other areas. In fact, if the fears of it severely disrupting ocean life bear out, then indeed this turns out to be a mass suicide pact to kill ourselves to enrich the few who profit off of this.

> It's easy to have others than the mining corporation making these decisions. It's not a new problem for undersea mining.

I think you greatly underestimate the challenge of scaling back industry once it gains economic and political power. If this is a 1T industry and we then find out we're heading for a massive ecological disaster, will we shut down the 1T industry on a dime or try to "mitigate" the fall out? Additionally, the amount of regulatory capture that seems to have happened in the governing body that would be making these decisions suggest that it won't be a measured approach to judging safety and efficacy.

I'll bite...

We've learned a ton in the last few decades about how interconnected and complicated ecosystems can be. Likewise we've learned that the deep ocean isn't disconnected from the surface. The two send resources, energy, and bio mass to each other.

Additionally, we are extremely reliant on the ocean in so many ways and ecological collapse of the ocean would be catastrophic for our planet.

So while yes we don't have a smoking gun that says "deep sea mining is going to destroy the planet" we are being pretty cavalier playing with things we do not understand.

Oke, how do you suppose we do anything then? Humanity doesn't understand the majority of processes we are involved in. If you are arguing for understanding prior to engaging in an activity them we might as well stop modern society.

There’s a huge difference between doing nothing and proceeding with caution. In circumstances where the risk of failure is low, we can afford to take big risks.

However, when the risks are huge, there is a merit to proceeding with caution.

There’s tons of prior art here when it comes to exploring new building materials, new pharmaceuticals, etc…

I agree we should always proceed with caution and that is exactly what I see happening here. Research is ongoing to determine possible effects. Instead of throwing up our hands and disallowing it.

Its very simple. REDUCE the FUCKING SCALE. Until you educate yourself about action and consequences of that action. Examples are very simple:

Everyone bitch about CO2 problem. Oh noes, we produce it so much, planet cannot absorb it... BINGO. If you cannot recycle CO2 itself, leave it to the planet, it does it very well. Unfortunately, humans pushed they industrial operation to the extreme, planet is no longer able to absorb exceed CO2. Cycle is broken, we have a problem.

The shalow thinking of people annoys me a lot. The main driver is greed, not wellbeing of humans (except tiny group of super rich of course).

We are currently in a mass extinction event, Insect populations are dropping like rocks and Ocean currents have been upended.

Modern society is quite literally disrupting these ecosystems, and you're suggesting we should continue fucking around with them before understanding the consequences of our actions?

We don't perform medicine like we did in the 19th century, cutting undesirable people open and seeing what happens, why should we do that on ecosystems when we know better?

I for one would rather the ocean continue to produce oxygen over some owner of a deep sea mining firm get rich.

You really don't! If someone wants to try to do a new thing for their own benefit that affects or depends on a shared resource it is their responsibility to establish that it isn't going to fuck us all.

Tragedy of the Commons Ruins Everything Around Me.

The point is that there is no way to do that. You can only do some research and say probably ya or probably na. I don't think harvesting precious metals is just for someones own benefit. This benefits everyone.

No there are far far more degrees of certainty available to us than just those. How much certainty is appropriate for which decisions is itself part of the domain of expertise here, a matter of research & informed discernment all on its own.

"This benefits everyone" has long been the battle cry of rentseekers and resource overexploiters. It may be technically correct in some narrow dispersed sense but come on. I benefit much more from a functioning ocean ecosystem than I do from a 0.0003% boost to the economy or whatever.

How?

How about we apply the same yardsticks to the alleged benefits?

The company that funded the study are disavowing/discrediting the results.

This article is garbage from the get-go.

"long-established view that life was made possible ..."

My understanding is that the consensus view is now that life began either in the deep sea or was transported here from another planet.

My understanding is that tenuous hypotheses are a poor basis for a supposed "consensus".

What we have with origin of life is a bunch of "maybe it worked this way" ideas, with no good way to test them.

The scientific method is based around theories and building consensus. Not sure why you or anyone else would refer to it as "tenuous" unless you haven't been following the research.

They're tenuous because there's very little reason for a skeptical person to believe any of it. It's conjecture piled on conjecture with a lot of handwaving. The fundamental problem of Origin of Life is unsolved.

This might be true if there were any actual deep-sea mining companies. By which I mean companies that actually do deep-sea mining and not just talk about doing it. Second, someone else asserted that the study was funded by one of these "deep sea mining" companies. So who the hell knows?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com