BIzarre fish appear in the submersible’s beam of light, including creepy creatures, some with transparent heads or glowing abdomens. Crabs, sea cucumbers, anemones and brittle stars are also illuminated. Thousands of meters under the sea, creatures swim in front of the cameras, which fascinate Sabine Gollner again and again, some of them no human being has ever seen. The Austrian is a marine biologist at the Royal Netherlands Marine Research Institute in Texel. Once a year she drives to the area between Mexico and Hawaii – and explores the deep sea. Sabine Gollner was particularly taken with colorful sponges on the bottom. “Beauty of the deep sea” she calls the sessile animals that are attached to dark lumps.
The world below seems lonely, silent and peaceful, like an endless desert of mud and stones. In fact, however, it is teeming with life, says Sabine Gollner. It could soon be over – and Gollner’s favorite animals are now threatened. Because the sponges grow on manganese nodules, lumpy metal compounds that lie at depths of 3,000 to 6,000 meters. Whenever the prices for rare metals on the world market rise, interest in salvaging the nodules from the deep sea grows. Two years ago, the island state of Nauru, together with a Canadian mining company, became the first nation to notify the Seabed Authority that they wanted to start deep-sea mining. Mining regulations must now be developed there, an undertaking with many unknowns. And time is pressing. A proposal must be in place by July.
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