Experts alarmed over Trump’s promotion of deep-sea mining in international waters

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here. In 2013, a deep-sea mining company named UK Seabed Resources contracted marine biologist Diva Amon and other scientists from the University of Hawaii at Manoa to survey a section of the seafloor in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a vast swath of international waters located in the Pacific Ocean that spans around 2 million square miles between Hawaii and Mexico. The area is known to have an abundant supply of rocky deposits the size of potatoes called polymetallic nodules. They are rich in metals like nickel, cobalt, copper, and manganese, which have historically been used to make batteries and electric vehicles. Someday, the company envisioned it might profit from mining them. But first it wanted to know more about the largely unexplored abyssal environment where they were found, Amon said. Using a remo ... Read full article.