Deep sea mining threatens sea life, environmentalists say. California law has a solution

“Right now we’re throwing away 47 pounds per person of e-waste every year, “ said Fiona Hines, a legislative analyst with CALPIRG. “That’s 3 million tons a year in the U.S.”

Currently, California, Massachusetts, Maine, Colorado, Minnesota and New York are the only states with Right to Repair laws, however 30 more are considering bills.

There are currently no deep sea mining operations taking place anywhere in the world’s oceans, although pilot and test runs have been conducted to evaluate the ecosystem response of extracting nodules from the ocean floor.

Those experiments and models have shown irreparable local damage, as well as more widespread harm caused by the clouds of sediment such activities could spread in ocean currents.

“These are some of the lowest resiliency ecosystems on the planet,” said McCauley.

Mining in them would create “harm that we, so far in all of our studies have not seen yet recover,” he said referring to a 1989 mining simulation off South America’s coast, which has still not rebounded 35 years later.

He said the deep sea area is not like shallower regions in the ocean, such as the Bikini Atoll in the central Pacific— over which 23 atomic bombs were dropped between 1946 and 1958 — but which is arguably flourishing today, having recovered coral, fish, turtle and invertebrate populations. Or like a rain forest, which can be devastated, but will eventually regrow — even if not with old growth.

In the regions proposed for deep sea mining, nothing seems to come back, he said.

“There are physical reasons for that — we’re talking about a space which has very low light, very low energy, extremely cold temperatures and high pressures. So life down there just moves at a much, much slower pace,” he said.

And then there are the sediment plumes that could block out sunlight or cloud usually crystal-clear waters, that worry fishermen and environmentalists. Unlike terrestrial operations, these plumes, tailings and waste can’t be confined — and models show them moving hundreds or thousands of miles.

“There are no borders recognized by wildlife in the ocean,” said Deehan, state director at Environment California. She noted the Pacific leatherback sea turtle, which is considered endangered. “It travels all the way from Indonesia across the Pacific Ocean back to California, every year. And then there are the whales that migrate all across world. These ecosystems, they are all interconnected and they support the wildlife in our ocean.”