Edit: ignore this post, I was wrong. > Thirty years on, the test that Thiel and a colleague devised is still the largest experiment ever on the potential impac

Edit: ignore this post, I was wrong. > Thirty years on, the test that Thiel and a colleague devised is still the largest experiment ever on the potential impacts of commercial deep-sea mining. Called DISCOL, the simple trial involved raking the centre of a roughly 11-square-kilometre plot in the Pacific Ocean with an 8-metre-wide implement called a plough harrow. The simulated mining created a plume of disturbed sediment that rained down and buried most of the study area, smothering creatures on the sea floor. The test revealed that the impacts of sea-bed mining reached further than anyone had imagined, but it did not actually extract any rocks from the sea bed, which itself would have destroyed even more marine life. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02242-y https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02242-y