#NPR: The U.S. takes a step toward allowing #mining on the ocean floor, a fragile #ecosystem

by Julia Simon, April 25, 2025

"President #Trump signed an executive order Thursday aimed at making it easier for companies to mine the deep seafloor, saying it would create 'a robust domestic supply for critical minerals.'

"There is currently no commercial-scale deep-sea mining anywhere in the world. But companies have long eyed the ocean floor as a potential source of metals like nickel, cobalt, manganese and copper, which are used in batteries for electric vehicles and other technologies.

"The world has no rulebook for deep-sea mining. One company is pushing forward anyway

"These metals can be found in potato-sized nodules lying on the ocean floor. Many of the nodules are in the middle of the Pacific ocean, beyond the legal territory of individual countries.

"Thursday's order might circumvent ongoing international negotiations to regulate deep-sea mining.

"Those regions have traditionally been overseen by an international organization, the #InternationalSeabedAuthority (#ISA). The ISA has hosted talks for years to try to hammer out a rulebook to govern a potential seabed mining industry. The U.S. did not ratify the treaty that governs the seabed, and is not a voting member of the ISA, though in the past under previous administrations it has respected the ISA process.

"In his executive order, Trump instructed federal agencies to expedite the process for reviewing and issuing permits for mining on the seafloor in both U.S. and international territory. It will use a U.S. law from 1980, the "#DeepSeabed Hard Mineral Resources Act."

"Scientists and environmental groups condemned the order, arguing that opening the deep seabed for mining could disrupt important marine ecosystems, and damage the fishing industry.

" 'This is being planned on some of the least resilient #ecosystems on the planet,' says Douglas McCauley, professor of ocean science at the University of California Santa Barbara. 'It would have #catastrophic biological consequences.'

"Underwater mining can create plumes of sediment that could suffocate marine life, and degrade the #FoodWebs that fish depend on, McCauley says.

"There are also important questions about whether we actually need to be mining the seabed to get enough of these minerals for technologies like batteries, says Micah Ziegler, assistant professor of energy and chemical systems at Georgia Institute of Technology.

"While a couple of years ago researchers were concerned about the limitations of land-based mining for metals like cobalt and nickel, a variety of alternative #battery chemistries have been developed that might reduce the need for those elements, Ziegler says."

Read more:
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/25/nx-s1-5376482/trump-seabed-mining-executive-order

#OceansAreLife #MarineLife #DeepSeaMining #NoDeepSeaMining
#DarkOxygen #LifeOnEarth #Extinction #Nodules #Greenwashing #CorporateColonialism #CorporatePolluters #TrumpSucks #Idiocracy
#BatteryAlternatives #NoCobaltMining #RecycleCopper #RecycleCobalt #RecycleZinc #Recycle! #Ecocide #PlanetDestroyers #HumanGreed #NoJobsOnADeadPlanet

"Satellite-based evidence of recent decline in global forest recovery rate from tree mortality events" by Yuchao Yan et al 2025.
Fascinating and educational. All the more for us in Germany and Finland, and likely other Europeans, whose forests morphed from CO2 sink to source. The study ends with 2020 data tho, Europe with 2018.
Only non-fire mortality events were analyzed.
I learned how recovery after a drought-driven forest mortality event depends onduring recovery; not so much the event severity.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41477-025-01948-4
Free e-pdf provided by one of the authors:
https://rdcu.be/eigV4

Don't know about you but to me, a paper is particularly "good" if I'm left with a host of new pressing questions. "Why did they..? Was it maybe ..? What if it had been...?"

For a recovery phase, they differentiate between recovery of the canopy greening and recovery of water content in the canopy. Both are based on satellite obs only. And if a satellite image suggests greening is recovered to pre-mortality level, it might not actually be re-greening from recovered old or new young trees but could be merely dense shrubbery. The Greening parameter is often used to glean carbon stock. Shrubs have less biomass=carbon than trees.
The water content in the canopy then somehow helps to clarify the actual recovery state. How?

Water content in canopy always takes far longer to recover than re-greening.
Longer = years and years longer.
Always = in the 1980s as well. Which I take as: that's the normal baseline behaviour for a given biome, a given latitude zone, a given climate zone, a given elevation, a given human intervention etc.

Supplementary Fig. 5. c and d show numbers for North America and Tropics https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41477-025-01948-4/MediaObjects/41477_2025_1948_MOESM1_ESM.pdf .
Recovery Time in years for water in canopy in North America
in the 1990s took 2 - 12, average 6.
in the 2000s took 2 - 18, average 9.

in the Tropics:
in the 1990s took 2 - 12, average 6.
in the 2000s took 2 - 11, average 7.

Europe is missing an extra whiskers plot. Maybe they saved this for their next paper. But European events are included up to 2018, if I got it right.

With all the factors to be considered, and bias in numbers of events in any given factor, making recovery comparable across regions, across biomes, across climate zones, a global average doesn't seem very useful.
However, here are the global numbers from Figure 1d for
Recovery time RT for water in canopy. In the 1980s RT was between 2 and 15, average 8, median 6 .
In the 1990s, RT was 2 - 22, average 8, median 6.
In the 2000s, RT was 2 - 20, average 9, median 9 years.

Am curious wrt the missing potential cause for the greatly reduced RecoveryTime in the 2010s in Fig.1d. Is that an artefact of the shortened observation time for these 10 most recent mortality yrs?
And Greening recovered astonishingly quickly in the 2010s. is it the high CO2 fertilisation or a regional bias from the events in this period?