Half a century after the world’s first deep sea mining tests picked nodules from the seafloor off the US east coast, the damage has barely begun to heal.
Plunging to the ocean’s abyss on the Blake Plateau, a deep-sea mountain range off the coast of North Carolina, is an otherworldly experience. It’s like no other ocean bed that microbiologist Samantha Joye has ever visited.
In her deep-sea submersible called Alvin – a three-person vessel made of titanium thick enough to withstand pressure in the ocean’s depths, with two robotic arms reaching outside for sample collection – it takes more than an hour to descend to about 2,000m (6,600ft) below the water’s surface.
On the way down, the water is on fire with bioluminescence and abounds with wildlife. There are huge fish, small fish and jellyfish. Shrimp, sea slugs, octopuses and hundreds of squid bump into the submarine, seeming to be curious about its free fall into their home.
“I have worked all over the place, and my mind was blown on the Blake Plateau. I mean, it’s just spectacularly diverse,” says Joye, recalling her last trip to the plateau in August 2018. At touchdown, the silty floor is covered in worms, sponges, stars and mussels the size of an adult human’s forearm, says Joye, gesturing to her own limb to show me.
Among the abundance of life, though, a section of the Blake Plateau is barren with the scars from the world’s first deep-sea mining pilot test carried out in 1970. That experiment 50 years ago was just a proof-of-concept, but full-scale commercial deep-sea mining is on many of today’s national to-do lists. In April 2025, Trump signed an executive order to fast-track deep-sea mining.
The traces of those first rudimentary tests on the Blake Plateau are still visible today, half a century on, and scientists think they’re just a small example of the effects deep-sea mining could have on the ocean ecosystem if it were to be conducted at scale. (BBC)