Mining the seafloor for valuable metals could send dangerous ripples through ocean food webs.
Tiny floating plankton, the base of the food web, can accidentally ingest particles of sediment kicked up by deep-sea mining operations — forgoing more nutritious food of similar size, researchers report November 6 in Nature Communications. That could trigger a bottom-up starvation cascade, even up to large marine predators, the team says.
Researchers have long feared that seabed mining could cause irreparable harm to deep-sea ecosystems. Equipment scraping the seafloor some 4,000 meters deep can disrupt fragile microbial communities in the sediment for decades. It can also kick up sediment plumes that can clog the