As Ms Scales notes, it is often said that more is known of the Moon’s surface, exposed to anyone with a telescope, than about the geography of the deep-sea floor, which a dark cloak of water obscures. It is a rugged, complex and shifting terrain—subject to earthquakes precipitated by the movement of tectonic plates, and punctuated by seamounts and hydrothermal vents that emit sulphurous, scalding fluids.
In these underwater extremes of dark and cold, and the boiling waters disgorged by vents, life survives and even thrives. It includes sea cucumbers that slough off their illuminated skin to distract predators, yeti crabs as hairy as their name suggests, fish masked in ultra-black skin that makes them all but invisible, and a sponge that looks like a glass of milk frozen in mid-spill.
Less beguiling things lurk down there too. Plastic bags and packaging have been spotted by submersibles in the seven-mile-deep Mariana Trench. Nuclear waste, chemicals and oil spills, such as the one from the Deepwater Horizon rig in 2010, have turned sections of sea floor into poisonous dumps. Exploitation adds to the blight. The orange roughy, a white-fleshed fish that congregates around seamounts has been dangerously overfished.
An experimental push to harvest sea-floor nodules laced with manganese, nickel, cobalt and other metals is another threat. The potential damage to the seabed from remotely operated machines is analogous, Ms Scales argues, to the most toxic mining on dry land. But the revenues could be huge. An analysis by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology calculated that a single seabed mine could net $1bn a year.
And an ecological case for the initiative can be made. “I get very uncomfortable when people describe us as deep-sea miners,” says Gerard Barron of DeepGreen Metals, a deep-sea mining company targeting the metals used in electric-car batteries. “We want to help the world transition away from fossil fuels.” Because the long-term impact is unknown, Ms Scales is sceptical; her argument is compelling, even if her explanation of car batteries is a slog.
Makes sense. A single cell is more complex than rocks on a moon.
where there is water, there is life -- all sorts of life
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