In dark waters near Collingwood, Ont., a giant yellow machine with metallic claws precisely snatches tiny rock balls from the lakebed, kicking up sediment with each grab.
While it looks like a claw game at an arcade, for Impossible Metals, it’s a demonstration of the technology the company plans to use more than 10,000 kilometres away, to mine mineral-rich nodules from the Pacific Ocean seabed. But for some scientists, it is a concerning signal of the push for more deep-sea mining, which they warn could have devastating consequences for the world’s oceans.
Writing in the journal Nature on Wednesday, a group of environmental scientists from across the world including Canada are calling for a total ban on deep-sea mining, saying the underwater ecosystems are “too important to the habitability of Earth to gamble with for the narrow and uncertain rewards.”
They say such mining would disturb seabeds, releasing the carbon storedthere (more than in shallower …