Harry Stevens

For the past few months, I've been reporting on the deep sea mining industry that uses extraordinary technology to extract metal from an environment that is as alien to us as the moon.

So the way this works is this massive collector vehicle, roughly the size of a city bus, is lowered from the side of a ship, and it goes down two miles or more, where it then moves along and sort of suctions up these nodules that are just resting on the seafloor.

And then they are pumped back up to the surface through this miles-long industrial straw.

The industry and its supporters are really excited about this technology.

For one thing, they stand to make incredible profits.

And they also point out that the alternative to seabed mining, which is land-based mining, has a pretty terrible track record of environmental abuses and labor abuses.

Meanwhile, environmentalists are strongly against this industry.

They're concerned that it's going to be tampering with a part of the ocean that we hardly know anything about, where there's all sorts of amazing otherworldly sea life that can be dependent on these nodules for their survival.

And that when the vehicle moves along and releases all this sediment, that it could be killing animals and having effects that propagate through the food chain.