‘Restoring sea floor after mining may not be possible’

KINGSTON

Scientists present at the latest effort to hash out international rules for deep-sea mining say it's unclear if it's possible to restore damaged sea floor ecosystems.

The sea floor is a coveted frontier for companies and countries eager to access minerals that are in high demand for emerging technologies such as electric cars.

Particularly coveted are potato-sized nodules containing cobalt, nickel, copper and manganese, that are found in abundance on the seabed in the central Pacific Ocean.

Companies eager to vacuum up these polymetallic nodules say they can do it with minimal risk to the deep-sea environment.

But ocean defenders have battled against what they see as the advent of an industry that will threaten isolated ecosystems that are not yet well understood.

That threat was underscored by European scientists who presented findings on the sidelines of a meeting in Kingston, Jamaica.

"If we remove nodules from the seabed, we do not know what we lose, only that it's lost forever," was one of the conclusions of DEEP REST, a sea floor conservation research project.

The DEEP REST study cautioned against using seabed restoration "as a management action for impacted habitats."

"So far, all the restoration operations we have attempted within our DEEP REST project have been short-term. And what we observed, is that in the given time, that is to say a few years, the ecosystems do not recover," said Jozee Sarrazin, a researcher.

"If restoration is possible, it will take a very long time, and at the moment we don't have the data to be able to say if that will be 100 years or 1000 years," the DEEP REST coordinator told AFP.