Ocean Mining: Time to Swarm the Deep?

Present-day ocean mining technologies center around the deployment of seabed crawlers engineered to harvest polymetallic nodules found at depths of over 4,000 min the Clarion Clipperton Zone (CCZ). While most of the tried-and-tested hardware is borrowed straight out of the offshore oil and gas toolkit, there are escalating concerns that these seafloor extraction methods will trigger irreparable damage todeep-sea biodiversity.