Below are excerpts quoted from an article published by The Atlantic on December 18, 2019 [1]:
Many people imagine the seabed to be a vast expanse of sand, but it’s a jagged and dynamic landscape with as much variation as any place onshore. Mountains surge from underwater plains, canyons slice miles deep, hot springs billow through fissures in rock, and streams of heavy brine ooze down hillsides, pooling into undersea lakes.
...
These peaks and valleys are laced with most of the same minerals found on land....For more than a century, oceanographers continued to identify new minerals on the seafloor—copper, nickel, silver, platinum, gold, and even gemstones—while mining companies searched for a practical way to dig them up.
...
Today, many of the largest mineral corporations in the world have launched underwater mining programs. On the west coast of Africa, the De Beers Group is using a fleet of specialized ships to drag machinery across the seabed in search of diamonds. In 2018, those ships extracted 1.4 million carats from the coastal waters of Namibia; in 2019, De Beers commissioned a new ship that will scrape the bottom twice as quickly as any other vessel. Another company, Nautilus Minerals, is working in the territorial waters of Papua New Guinea to shatter a field of underwater hot springs lined with precious metals, while Japan and South Korea have embarked on national projects to exploit their own offshore deposits. But the biggest prize for mining companies will be access to international waters, which cover more than half of the global seafloor and contain more valuable minerals than all the continents combined.
People have continued to exploit and modify genetically natural resources grown on land for profit leading to negative consequences such as climate change, bees and other insects "disappearing in unprecedented numbers." [2] The "extinction rate [of insects] is eight times faster than the observed pace of extinction for mammals, birds, and reptiles." [3]
In the past, mass extinctions have been caused by the emergence of ice ages or asteroid collisions. This mass extinction, however, is driven by human activities — namely deforestation, habitat destruction, mining, and carbon-dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming. [4]
Who knows what consequences will result by the industrial mining of the world's seabed? Will sea water become so toxic from having high concentrations of certain known and unknown chemicals hidden below the sea bed leaking into the oceans resulting from the seabed disturbed so that nearly all marine life will have to struggle to survive in it, if they survive at all? Will the water's salinity and temperature change as well?
By the time people realize the negative consequences of digging up the ocean floor, it may already be too late to reverse the damages done but just in time to bring Revelation Chapter 21, verse 1 to life [5]:
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth. The former heaven and the former earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. [Emphasis added.]
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/historys-largest-mining-operation-is-about-to-begin/ar-BBY7fU8?ocid=spartanntp
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/insects-dying-off-sign-of-6th-mass-extinction-2019-2
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] http://www.usccb.org/bible/revelation/21
No comments:
Post a Comment