The trouble is that, currently, much the stuff comes from problematic sources. These would one day present immense value to human beings.Īs 21st Century technology surges, so too does the demand for its constituent materials, such as cobalt, which is used in lithium-ion batteries to power cars and electronics. What that expedition chemist in 1873 didn’t identify is that the nodules also contain metals, such as cobalt, nickel, copper, titanium and rare earth elements. Yet recently these nodules have also caught the eye of a rapacious land mammal, which needs them for their smartphones. But over time, they have become so abundant that they cover large swathes of the ocean’s abyssal plain. It takes them millions of years to grow only a few centimetres. Not all begin with a tooth – others contain fragment of shell, a bone shard, or nothing at all – but the slow pace of accretion is always the same. And so began one of the slowest geological phenomena on Earth: the growth of a polymetallic nodule. Gradually, as metals precipitated out of the sea and water within the sediment, the tooth became coated in minerals. One day, a shark shed a tooth, which drifted hundreds of metres to the ocean floor. To understand why these marks are there – and why they matter – we need to dive into a prehistoric sea. The scarred landscapes created by humanity's material thirst.Japan's grand plan to mine deep-sea vents.What might future generations make of them, and what might they say about humanity's demand for resources in the early 21st Century? Soon, there will be many more tracks like these carved all over the ocean abyss, one of the last untouched wildernesses. Recently, scientists have returned with cameras and probes to look at what has happened to the local ecosystems – and what they have found are scars that have never fully healed. Dating to the 1970s and 1980s, the marks are the first tentative scrapings of deep-sea mining trials, left behind by ships equipped with dredges and ploughs, now long since departed.
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