Erik Cordes, a researcher at Temple University and frequent visitor to the deep ocean says when you sink into the deepest part of the Central Pacific Ocean the known world vanishes and a new world appears.

When one reaches the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone, an area almost as big as the USA lying 12,000 feet deep under the water, a million dollar scenery spreads out. Innumerable microscopic rock-like eggs containing precious metals like copper, titanium, manganese are found here. Unfortunately, no matter how deep these things lie (even as deep as the Mariana Trench), mining companies haven’t left any bit of it untouched. And so the viscous yet transparent water has started to grow foul in these regions due to increasing human activities.

Mining the Depths

These rock-like eggs are actually nodules which have gathered minerals over centuries. A 1985 Study showed that an estimated amount of 550 billion metric tons (610 billion tons) of nodules is present in the sea.

Of the two types of mining strategies lately proposed, one is Nodule Mining at a depth of 13,000-20,000 feet. It is not yet formulated how to do the mining, but suggestions of deepwater vacuuming and underwater trawlers have been already made. The other mining strategy is targeted around sulfur vents and similar seeps, which would be done under only 4,000-12,000 feet deep.

Companies associated with these mining projects have asserted that since there is a lot of stuff under the sea, disturbing only a little bit will be enough to get the ores. That is, they deem the projects “friendly”.

These targeted parts of the deep ocean might be home to a number of species and so disturbing them may wipe out the whole lot of them. In fact, Lisa Levin, an expert in the deep sea at Scripps Institute of Oceanography says “They’re going into new environments with a lot of environmental impacts. We are going to lose stuff before we ever discover it.”

Climate Change and the Deep Ocean

The deep ocean is more prone to harm due to climate change than we can realize. The deep ocean has accumulated a quarter to a third of the CO2 humans have released, according to Andrew Thurber, an assistant professor at Oregon State University. The deep ocean is also one the greatest mitigators of climate change, as it absorbs heat along with CO2. And recently, the ocean has been found to absorb more heat than before, leading to the rise in temperature of the ocean itself. This is a big issue of concern in the present date.

Trickle Down Effects

Earlier it was thought that since the deep ocean was isolated from the surface, pollutants or any kind of wastage would not affect it. In reality, both parts of the ocean are closely connected and what happens on the surface vastly affects the deep ocean.

Consider the aftermath of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill on the Gulf of Mexico. It was thought that the oil would float, but it did not. And the dispersant used to neutralize the oil was more toxic than the oil.

It was also believed that the deep ocean is a waste land, but it is rather cleaner than the surface. “The deeper you go, the more stable the environment is; the more stable it is, the less those organisms can deal with changes,” says Cordes.

Those organisms take more time to adapt to the changes than those living at the surface. In fact, life in the deep sea is slow growing. “If we put something in the deep ocean, we pretty much can’t clean it up,” Thurber says. Thus, our decisions around greenhouse gas emissions at the surface have now affected every ecosystem on Earth.

Permanent Decline

Fishing in the deep ocean is also posing a big threat. The fishes living in the deep waters also have a slow population growth. So it takes a long time for those fishes to repopulate their number to the previous range, unlike fishes in the surface water.

For example, the deep water fish slimehead is hunted for its delicious orange flesh (the fish turns orange after death). But unlike cods which can grow to maturity in only two years, slimheads take 20 to 30 years.

In order to save these fishes and the deep water itself, deep water fishing has to be stopped altogether. But unfortunately, that is not really happening.

Direct Connection

While the deep ocean is a new world that we are so eager to explore, we might actually damage it even before we get to know a bit of it.

“[The deep oceans] are supporting these fish that we are depending on for food, they’re helping to recycle nutrients that come back to shallow waters, fuel the productivity of the ocean, produce half of the oxygen we breathe,” says Cordes. “We are directly connected to them.”