Now we want some Silver’s fish & chips.

The shark teeth in those nodules weren’t meant to be mined. They were meant to be reminders.
The deep sea doesn’t need more extraction.
It needs witnesses.
It needs restraint.
It needs us to decide that progress doesn’t have to begin with a wound.

#OceanHoptimism #DeepSea #YourPhoneCanWait

We are not starved for imagination. We can build circular economies. We can redesign supply chains. We can reduce, reuse, and recycle the metals already above ground. But none of that matters if we don’t first say: some places — and some timelines — should remain untouched.

Maybe the real question isn’t “How do we mine the deep sea responsibly?”
Maybe it’s: “What does it say about us if we do?”
What does it mean to take something 10 million years in the making and sacrifice it to a device we’ll replace in 24 months?

But here’s what we do know: the deep sea is a living archive. Every nodule is a story. Some begin with a shark tooth that drifted down like a message in a bottle from a world before ours. Mining turns those stories back into undifferentiated dust.

And the ecological impacts? We don’t know. Full stop. We don’t understand how sediment plumes travel. We don’t know how deep-sea food webs recover—or if they do at all. We don’t know what happens when you scrape an ancient carbon sink across thousands of square miles.

But it’s not just the ethics. A recent economic study (the same one we highlighted earlier this week) shows the math doesn’t hold. Polymetallic nodule mining isn’t the golden ticket industry claims: more risk than return, more hype than payoff, more externalities than answers.

A global push now wants these nodules as raw materials—iron, manganese, nickel, copper, cobalt, zinc—for the next phone upgrade. A fossilized shark tooth, an apex predator from a vanished sea, cracked open on a conveyor belt so someone gets a marginally faster camera. That’s the trade on the table.

That got us thinking. We talk about deep-sea mining like it’s just another extraction frontier. But these nodules aren’t “ore.” They’re time. Their geo/ecological patience made tangible. They grow micromillimeter by micromillimeter over millions of years. Disturb them once, and they don’t come back.

Huge thanks to Liz Taylor for an unforgettable evening of curiosity, courage, and ocean possibility (Plus: a virtual cameo from Her Deepness, Sylvia Earle). Our crowd left buzzing, and ready to dive deeper. 🌊🦈🛠️
#OceanHoptimism

And the future? It’s bright, ambitious, and shaped like Project Honu’s next-gen submersibles. Modular, field-ready, community-centered engineering that will open the deep ocean to more science, more storytelling, and more people who care enough to protect it.
www.honusubs.com

Liz also highlighted DOER’s autonomous marine vehicles—tools sometimes used in vital search-and-recovery efforts when sending divers is too risky, or when the lost material is dangerous, like unexploded ordnance or the radioactive waste barrels sunk off the Farallon Islands here in the SF Bay Area.

From there Liz took us deep—deep deep—into the world of subsea exploration. DOER Marine’s work has mapped unknown terrains, supported groundbreaking science, and delivered the tools researchers rely on to study life in places where the sun never reaches.

SF Bay’s Hope Spot future isn’t guaranteed. It’s a working, industrial bay facing real pressures, and it’ll take work—not just hope—to get there. But the first step can be small: as Liz says, grab a mask, put your face in the water, and snorkel a seagrass bed at Point Molate. Find your wonder.

Mission Blue Hope Spots are special ocean places—rich, fragile, and vital—championed by local communities and global science as areas where protection can spark recovery. From kelp forests to deep-sea canyons, there are now 167 Hope Spots lighting up the blue planet.
#OceanHoptimism #HopeSpots