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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 ecosyste

by bpx51 2y ago

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.

j16sdiz 2y ago
According to the article, this new discovery(?) actually go _against_ their interest. Either that, or lots of missing links and details...
- robaato 2y ago
  Indeed which is why they are discrediting it ;)
- rswail 2y ago
  The company that funded the study are disavowing/discrediting the results.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  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.
  - rowanG077 2y ago
    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.
    - bognition 2y ago
      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.
      - rowanG077 2y ago
        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.
        bognition 2y ago
        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…
        rowanG077 2y ago
        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.
        Borg3 2y ago
        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).
    - vlovich123 2y ago
      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.
      - BurningFrog 2y ago
        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.
        sepositus 2y ago
        > 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.
        BurningFrog 2y ago
        True. And to me, as a human, the "humans are bad" crowd are an enemy and need to be fought and defeated.
    - giraffe_lady 2y ago
      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.
      - rowanG077 2y ago
        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.
        giraffe_lady 2y ago
        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.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        anigbrowl 2y ago
        How?
      - thwarted 2y ago
        Tragedy of the Commons Ruins Everything Around Me.
    - anigbrowl 2y ago
      How about we apply the same yardsticks to the alleged benefits?
- intrasight 2y ago
  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.
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    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.
    - intrasight 2y ago
      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.
      - pfdietz 2y ago
        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.
doodlebugging 2y ago
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.
- adolph 2y ago
  > 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/ https://www.cia.gov/legacy/museum/exhibit/project-azorian/ 1. https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Mans-Bluff-Submarine-Espionage/dp/1610393589 https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Mans-Bluff-Submarine-Espionage/...
  - chrisweekly 2y ago
    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) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playground_(novel)
rmah 2y ago
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?

by bpx51 2y ago

j16sdiz 2y ago

According to the article, this new discovery(?) actually go _against_ their interest. Either that, or lots of missing links and details...

robaato 2y ago
Indeed which is why they are discrediting it ;)
rswail 2y ago
The company that funded the study are disavowing/discrediting the results.
PaulHoule 2y ago
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.
- rowanG077 2y ago
  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.
  - bognition 2y ago
    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.
    - rowanG077 2y ago
      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.
      - bognition 2y ago
        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…
        rowanG077 2y ago
        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.
      - Borg3 2y ago
        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).
  - vlovich123 2y ago
    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.
    - BurningFrog 2y ago
      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.
      - sepositus 2y ago
        > 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.
        BurningFrog 2y ago
        True. And to me, as a human, the "humans are bad" crowd are an enemy and need to be fought and defeated.
  - giraffe_lady 2y ago
    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.
    - rowanG077 2y ago
      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.
      - giraffe_lady 2y ago
        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.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - anigbrowl 2y ago
        How?
    - thwarted 2y ago
      Tragedy of the Commons Ruins Everything Around Me.
  - anigbrowl 2y ago
    How about we apply the same yardsticks to the alleged benefits?
intrasight 2y ago
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.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  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.
  - intrasight 2y ago
    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.
    - pfdietz 2y ago
      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.

doodlebugging 2y ago

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.

adolph 2y ago
> 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/ https://www.cia.gov/legacy/museum/exhibit/project-azorian/ 1. https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Mans-Bluff-Submarine-Espionage/dp/1610393589 https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Mans-Bluff-Submarine-Espionage/...
- chrisweekly 2y ago
  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) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playground_(novel)

rmah 2y ago

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?