It's impossible to imagine a level of environmental degradation that would cause extraction companies to say "On second thought, let's leave that resource where

It's impossible to imagine a level of environmental degradation that would cause extraction companies to say "On second thought, let's leave that resource where it is." To wit: open-face mining the sea floor (http://www.seeker.com/worlds-first-deep-sea-mining-venture-set-to-launch-in-2019-2327856967.html http://www.seeker.com/worlds-first-deep-sea-mining-venture-s...) "The machines, each the size of a small house, are equipped with rock-crushing teeth resembling the large incisors of a dinosaur. The robots will lumber across the ocean floor on mammoth treads, grinding and chewing the encrusted seabed, sending plumes of sediment into the surrounding waters and killing marine life that gets in their way. The smallest of the robots weighs 200 tons. 'A lot of people don't realize that there are more mineral resources on the seafloor than on land," said Michael Johnston, CEO of Nautilus, by phone from the company's field office in Brisbane, Australia. "Technology has allowed us to go there.' ... Over two-dozen contracts have already been granted to explore hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean floor by a United Nations body called the International Seabed Authority (ISA), which regulates areas of the seafloor that lie outside of any national jurisdiction."