We Need To Regulate The Seabed Before Mining Companies Destroy It

by The Daily Eye Team February 11 2017, 6:34 pm Estimated Reading Time: 0 mins, 52 secs

On Thursday, an international group of marine scientists published an article in Science in which they outlined the desperate need for an international effort to regulate the ocean floor, in order to preserve the deep sea's unique and largely uncharted ecosystems. The article came in response to the growing threat to these ecosystems from commercial deep sea activities, particularly deep sea mining. The deep ocean (defined as anything below a depth of about 650 feet) accounts for roughly 65 percent of the Earth's surface, but we know startlingly little about it. Indeed, we have better maps of the surface of Mars than we do of the ocean floor, to say nothing of our knowledge of the lifeforms that are found thousands of feet beneath the surface. As Oregon State University ocean ecologist Andrew Thurber put it, the discovery of new species is "the name of the game" in seabed ecology, which is great for science, but troubling insofar as it demonstrates the degree of our ignorance about the deep ocean.