Dawn Wright: I’ve explored the ocean’s deepest part. Trump wants to destroy it

I spent years preparing to dive into the deepest place on Earth. Only a handful of people have traveled into the depths of the Mariana Trench, nearly 7 miles below the ocean surface. As a geologist who studies these underwater mountains and valleys, this opportunity to descend into the deepest part of the deep ocean was nothing short of spectacular.

That’s why I felt the news that the Trump administration wants to open the seafloor near the Mariana Trench to deep-sea mining like a punch to my stomach.

In these parts of the deep sea, towering hydrothermal vents teem with life thriving without sunlight. Bioluminescent squid swim alongside fish with their hearts and lungs visible through translucent skin. When I heard that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management started the official leasing process for deep-sea mining around the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands and American Samoa, my mind flashed to the image of a bulldozer heading for these underwater landscapes I love.

Just recently, all of Alaska’s waters more than 3 miles from shore were added to BOEM’s list, expanding the area of possible destruction.

Scientists like me know the areas we study intimately. We’ve taken focused visits to better understand these places that few other humans have seen, using technology as advanced as that from journeys to the moon. Like astronauts who go into space, we are deeply moved by what we see under the surface. We come back with stories of incredible landscapes and ocean life, eager to share what we’ve experienced.

We’re only just starting to understand the deep sea and, by extension, our planet. Moving forward with something as intrusive and invasive as deep-sea mining in a place about which we still have so much to learn simply makes no sense.

Only about 25% of the ocean floor has been mapped at high resolution using ships and robots. For the deep ocean, that figure drops to just 0.001% in terms of what we have seen with our own eyes. My submersible dive into the Mariana Trench in 2022 was like going to one small corner of a house with a flashlight: It illuminated just a portion of what can be seen and known.

Mapping the sea floor allows us to better understand so much, like wave patterns during tsunamis or increasingly intense hurricanes. What happens in the deep doesn’t stay confined there – it’s all interconnected.

The deep sea is integral in ocean cycling processes that carry nutrients and oxygen all over our planet. This underexplored realm is the basis of food chains that sustain billions of people and helps cool the planet by safely locking away heat, as well as carbon.

While we’re just beginning to learn about the deep sea, we know enough about deep-sea mining to say clearly: It’s destructive, it’s unproven and it’s not needed.

This disruption of the mining process would ripple in different ways: as a sediment plume release that spreads for miles and harms marine life, and as a loss to science and humanity for never knowing what was there.

The people living in the Pacific Islands who would be most directly impacted by the repercussions of deep-sea mining have said clearly and forcefully that they oppose it. They understand the steep cost that comes with questionable benefit.

I grew up in Hawaii, and living on islands born from the ocean floor that rose from the deepest parts of the central Pacific Ocean taught me from a young age that everything is interconnected, that we are a part of the ocean – not separate from it.

The Pacific Islanders near the Mariana Trench and American Samoa should be able to steward the ocean as they have for generations.

Deep-sea mining is an unnecessary and reckless race to the bottom. The deep ocean is one of the last great frontiers of knowledge on Earth – we can explore it for humanity or mine it to enrich a few.

The choice is clear: Protect and explore one of Earth’s last frontiers, or destroy it before we even understand what we are losing.

Dawn Wright is a professor of geography and oceanography at Oregon State University. In 2022, she became the first Black person to visit the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, the deepest and most unexplored place on earth.