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
No comments:
Post a Comment