sea molluscs face extinction as ISA urged to fast
A new report warns that 62% of deep-sea molluscs face extinction due to the environmental impact of deep-sea mining. These organisms are vital to ecosystem health and hold potential for future technological innovations.
Why it matters
The potential loss of these species could collapse fragile deep-sea ecosystems and erase biological data before it can be studied for human advancement.
The molluscs are critical to deep-sea biodiversity and hold invaluable biological secrets useful for human technology, but the new report reveals over half would go extinct if mining goes ahead
The natural world has evolved in ingenious and bizarre ways to survive some of the most hostile environments on the planet. Take for instance deep-sea molluscs, which survive in temperatures of up to 450ºC, living on hydrothermal vents some 5000 metres below the surface.
Many of these molluscs – including snails, limpets, mussels, clams and chitons – were left untouched for millenia, and were in fact only discovered in the past 10 years.
But, a new global assessment of these species has found that 62% face extinction due to deep-sea mining.
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