The process could have a devastating effect on species in deep sea habitats, experts said.

Prof Adrian Glover, merit researcher at the Natural History Museum, who led the review, said: “Contrary to general thoughts that we don’t know anything about the impact of a mining machine and the sea floor, we do actually know quite a lot.”

He said experiments over the years have produced useful data and that the findings are “not actually that surprising”.

“If you drive a six-to-10m wide giant vehicle over the seafloor … not surprisingly, you see decadal scales for any kind of recovery whatsoever.

“If you drive a large ploughing vehicle over a grassland habitat in the south-east of England it will take many decades to recover.”

Link to open access paper…

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-025-02911-4

Also see this article

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2025/december/deep-sea-mining-reduces-number-of-seafloor-animals-by-almost-40-percent.html