The unseen man-made 'tracks' on the deep ocean floor

Some might argue that damaging deep ocean life is a sacrifice worth making when weighed against human rights abuses at mines in Africa. Yet it is unlikely that one type of mining will simply displace the other, says David Santillo of Greenpeace Research Laboratories at the University of Exeter, who recently co-authored a review of seabed mining and its potential impacts in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science. "There are different companies involved, different markets to some extent, different demand-side pressures and incentives... so if seabed mining does take off, it is more likely that it will simply become an additional source of minerals."

While the importance of deep-sea life may be difficult to quantify in human moral or economic terms, it does nonetheless have an intrinsic value. And the fact that its slow, long-term timescales are so quick to disrupt should be a reason for caution, according to the scientists I spoke with.

As for those dredged tracks, if future generations one day find them on the ocean floor, they will have persisted long beyond the lifetime of the smartphone, laptop or electric car that helped to carve them.

In the words of David Farrier, author of the book Footprints, such traces eventually become "future fossils". In the age of the Anthropocene, Farrier argues that we are leaving behind unwanted industrial, chemical and geological heirlooms that will persist for centuries. "Future fossils are our legacy and therefore our opportunity to choose how we will be remembered," he writes. "They will record whether we carried on heedlessly despite the dangers we knew to lie ahead, or whether we cared enough to change our course. Our footprints will reveal how we lived to anyone still around to discover them, hinting at the things we cherished or neglected, the journeys we made and the direction we chose to take."

It's possible the marks may well be read as a damning signature of our consumption habits in the early 21st Century. "If we are going to run out of certain minerals unless we destroy a large area of the seabed, then surely this is the signal to look again at how wasteful we are being with those minerals we have," says Santillo. "If what we end up doing by mining the seabed is simply to extend unsustainable consumption patterns for another 30 years, or even accelerate them by bringing yet more materials to market… we won't have changed anything."

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