Vast underwater desert ‘home to thousands of unknown species’ at risk from mining

Our Foreign Staff

THE TELEGRAPH
Mon, 24 July 2023 

A carnivorous sponge, Axoniderma mexicana, found in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone - AFP

A vast area at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean earmarked for controversial deep-sea mineral mining is home to thousands of species unknown to science, according to several new studies.

Miners are eyeing an abyssal plain stretching between Hawaii and Mexico, known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), for the rock-like “nodules” scattered across the seafloor that contain minerals used in clean energy technologies like electric car batteries.

The lightless ocean deep was once considered a virtual underwater desert, but as mining interest has grown, scientists have scoured the region exploring its biodiversity, with much of the data over the last decade coming from commercially funded expeditions.


And the more they look the more they have found, from a giant sea cucumber dubbed the “gummy squirrel” and a shrimp with a set of elongated bristly legs, to the many different tiny worms, crustaceans and mollusks living in the mud.

A 'mount-building' shrimp photographed by an autonomous marine robot during an expedition to the NE Pacific abyss - AFP

The abyssal urchin Plesiodiadema globulosum, one of the most abundant invertebrates found in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone - AFP

That has intensified concerns about controversial proposals to mine the deep sea, with the International Seabed Authority on Friday agreeing a two-year roadmap for the adoption of deep-sea mining regulations, despite conservationists’ calls for a moratorium.

Abyssal plains over three kilometres underwater cover more than half of the planet, but surprisingly little is known about them.

They are the “last frontier”, said marine biologist Erik Simon-Lledo, who led research published on Monday in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution that mapped the distribution of animals in the CCZ and found a more complex set of communities than previously thought.

“Every time we do a new dive we see something new,” said Mr Simon-Lledo, of Britain’s National Oceanography Centre.

Campaigners say this biodiversity is the true treasure of the deep sea and warn that mining would pose a major threat by churning up huge plumes of previously undisturbed sediment.

The nodules themselves are also a unique habitat for specialised creatures.

“With the science as it is at the present day, there is no circumstance under which we would support mining of the seabed,” said Sophie Benbow of the NGO Fauna and Flora.

The CCZ has both its age and its size to thank for the unique creatures discovered there, scientists say.

A glass sponge from the Euplectellidae family - AFP

The region is “mind-bogglingly vast”, said Adrian Glover, of Britain’s Natural History Museum, a co-author both on the study with Mr Simon-Lledo and on the first full stocktake of species in the region published in Current Biology in May.

That study found that more than 90 per cent of species recorded in the CCZ - some 5,000 species - are new to science.

The region, which was considered to be essentially barren before an increase in exploration in the 1970s, is now thought to have a slightly higher diversity than the Indian Ocean, said Mr Glover.

He said sediment sampling devices from the region might only capture 20 specimens each time - compared to maybe 20,000 in a similar sample in the Antarctic - but that in the CCZ you have to go much further to find the same creature twice.

Scientists are now also able to use autonomous underwater vehicles to survey the seabed.

These are what helped Mr Simon-Lledo and his colleagues find that corals and brittlestars are common in shallower eastern CCZ regions, but virtually absent in deeper areas, where you see more sea cucumbers, glass sponges and soft-bodied anemones.

He said any future mining regulations would have to take into account that the spread of animals across the area is “more complex than we thought”.