Monday, August 29, 2022

Do humans really need to do this?

Deep-Sea Riches: Mining
a Remote Ecosystem

By Sabrina Imbler and Jonathan CorumAug. 29, 2022

Millions of years ago, a shark lost a tooth.  The tooth fell thousands of feet and settled on the deep ocean floor.

Over millennia, minerals in the seawater gradually coated the tooth with layers of metals:  cobalt, copper, iron, manganese and nickel — with traces of lithium and rare-earth elements like yttrium.

The metals accumulated slowly, a few millimeters every million years.

The result was a potato-size lump known as a polymetallic nodule.

Today, billions of tons of these nodules cover wide swaths of the ocean floor, several miles below the surface.

One of the largest areas is the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, which covers 1.7 million miles of the Pacific seabed and holds vast fields of nodules.

Article continues at this Link 


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