Wait, beneath the sea floor?
OUGHGH??
OIUOHGHHVOIH!!!!!
HOLY SHIT
So I looked this up and there's three things I think should be mentioned:
Yes, this is real.
They found this ecosystem in underground hydrothermal caves where the water was 75 degrees Fahrenheit (25 degrees Celsius) and when it says "volcanic fluids" it means that, or where the hot water in the caves comes up through cracks to mix with the colder water above, allowing minerals and nutrients from the volcanic caves to escape and dissolved oxygen from the open ocean to enter.
The robot that tested the hypothesis of life under the seafloor was called SuBastian.
There’s a hole in the bottom of the sea.
There’s a hole in the bottom of the sea.
There’s a hole. There’s a hole.
There’s a hole in the bottom of the sea...
See THIS is why (another reason why) we need to all be more informed about and active against the deep sea mining that is in its infancy but trying like hell to ramp up fast
The rich and greedy are trying to scrape up the bottom of the sea for money, because of course they are
That last one, if you missed it, says "Deep Sea Mining Could Begin Soon, Regulated Or Not"
Deep sea mining could provide minerals essential for making electric vehicles. But regulations are incomplete, and questions persist about t
"scientists can't agree if that's good" is a little misleading tho. Should be more like "scientists don't know enough to give you proof of all the ways it's bad" would be more accurate
All those, like, rock footballs on the bottom in the NPR pic above? They have things like nickle and zinc in them, and they want to use stuff like this machine to scrape them all up
It's even worse than you think btw
not only do all those football rocks (nodes) have micro ecologies that we don't understand and could be important to, you know, the foundational ecosystem of the entire planet, but also
the ocean is a huge carbon sink. That means it takes in and locks down carbon gasses (you know, those greenhouse gasses we're struggling to not let kill basically all of planet earth)
well. turns out when you stir up the ocean sediment, it
A: interferes with the oceans ability to take in and hold carbon
B: actually releases carbon gases back into the atmosphere
C:
fucks with all the wildlife by completely changing their local environment, removing lots of microbial organisms, changing the shape of the ocean floor, and making the water all cloudy and full of things that aren't usually floating around in the water. Also, like, WE DIDN'T EVEN KNOW ABOUT THE UNDERGROUND ECOSYSTEM OP IS POSTING ABOUT which is the kind of thing this sort of operation would destroy without us even knowing what we were destroying.
And we need to be informed and outraged about it because there is a lot of money going into doing this despite these serious concerns and i don't think enough of the general public is aware of what they are trying to do
One of the largest mining operations ever seen on Earth aims to despoil an ocean we are only barely beginning to understand
Reblogging because I'm glad people on here are talking about the issue of deep sea mining, because I've been looking upon it in the background and yeah holy shit it's real bad.
Like, I forget where I read it, but I saw a legit study looking at what happened to the ocean where a minor test attempt at that sort of mining was done.
Decades later it was still basically an ecological desert, devoid of life. Now imagine that expanded en-masse.
Like, as much as I'm a believer in the need to figure out how we get the minerals for global green electrification (and global personal computing/internet to some degree), I think it's a moral imperative that we don't create ecological horrors in that process, whether it be in the Global South or in the deep sea...
And for clarity's sake, when I talk about ecological horrors I also talk about human rights horrors.
Like, wrt minerals, the nightmare of human suffering in countries like the DRC have been talked about a lot, but...
...Well, remember those Somali Pirates? And how if you looked at why they were doing that, it was due to a combination of the Global North dropping their waste there and screwing over the fishermen, and foreign fisheries sniping their fishermen's livelihoods further?
Call this a hypothesis but, imagine what turbofucking the deep sea like they plan to do with this mining is going to do to communities like that who rely on the sea for their livelihoods, all over the globe?
Ecological issues are human rights issues, I'll say that again and again...
