I daydream that an undersea civilization resented the pillaging of their entire ecosystem and attacked the mining robot in self-defense.
But no, probably just a mechanical failure. Soon they'll be back to sterilizing the ocean bottom. Sigh.
But no, probably just a mechanical failure. Soon they'll be back to sterilizing the ocean bottom. Sigh.
> Thirty years on, the test that Thiel and a colleague devised is still the largest experiment ever on the potential impacts of commercial deep-sea mining. Called DISCOL, the simple trial involved raking the centre of a roughly 11-square-kilometre plot in the Pacific Ocean with an 8-metre-wide implement called a plough harrow. The simulated mining created a plume of disturbed sediment that rained down and buried most of the study area, smothering creatures on the sea floor. The test revealed that the impacts of sea-bed mining reached further than anyone had imagined, but it did not actually extract any rocks from the sea bed, which itself would have destroyed even more marine life.
Low-impact? We have very different definitions for that phrase.
That might be the claustrophobic plot of Underwater (2020). Deep-sea mining operations in the Mariana Trench.