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In 1972, Hjalmar Thiel, a young ecologist, came to a remote part of the Pacific Ocean, the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ). It has one of the largest unexploited rare earth deposits in the world. About 4000 meters below the sea level, there are trillions of polymetallic nodules in the deep-sea sediments of CCZ. They are potato-sized sediments, full of copper, nickel, manganese and other precious minerals.
The ghostly sponge that lives on a seamount in the Pacific Ocean has been listed as one of the targets of companies planning to engage in seabed mining. The ghostly sponge that lives on a seamount in the Pacific Ocean has been listed as one of the targets of companies planning to engage in seabed mining.
Thiel is interested in the region's little-studied benthic microfauna, microfauna that live above and between mineral nodules. His companions, all intending to mine, were eager to make a profit from the rich mineral deposits. "We quarreled a lot." He said. On another trip, Thiel visited the Red Sea, and prospective miners with him were eager to extract valuable minerals from the metal-rich sediment there. On one occasion, he warned them that if they mined as planned and spilled waste sludge on the sea, small plankton would probably be unable to breathe. "They almost drowned me in the sea." Thiel recalled his companions.
In the ensuing confrontation, Thiel, who was working at the University of Hamburg in Germany, questioned how industry planned to test the environmental impact of seabed mining. People are impatiently suggesting that he test himself. So from 1989, he did it.
Thiel and a colleague's experiment 30 years later is still the largest ever on the potential impact of commercial deep-sea mining. The simple experiment, called DISCOL, was carried out by scraping an eight-metre-wide plough rake from the center of an 11-square-kilometre test site at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. This simulated mining process caused a large amount of sediment to be stirred up, and they fell over most of the test site, making the sea floor creatures breathless. This experiment shows that the impact of seabed mining is more profound than anyone expected, but it does not actually extract any ore, and ore removal can damage more marine life.


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