Brittle Brittle little star, how I wonder what you are.

Bottom crawlers, brittle stars and the land of perpetual light.

BSP / 2024
About Deep Sea Mining

↪︎ N 29.3692 W 136.9411 S 3.9166 E 151.7313), 2021, 3D render sonar data of the Clarion Clipperton Zone.

The deep-sea is a delicate, alien world that took its own evolutionary course under unimaginable pressures, lack of light and food scarcity, creating dynamic landscapes and a menagerie of unimaginable creatures that can live for hundreds to thousands of years.

Nevertheless, it has justifiably been characterized as “Earth’s last frontier” since we have only scratched the surface of what there is to know. Brittle stars are amongs the most emblematic mobile inhabitants of the deep. Some of them have lived and evolved in the deep for 70 million years without ever seeing a single ray of light. They are found among or upon walnut-sized nodules, the only hard substrate in their habitat.

These polymetallic nodules grow only a few millimeters per million years. They contain rare and valuable Deep-sea ‘clean-energy’ metals and have recently turned the deep sea into a modern-day El Dorado. In 2023 commercial mining will start in the Clarion Clipperton Zone, a deep-sea plain of approximately the size of the United States. When commercial deep sea mining starts, bus-sized vacuum cleaners, built to suck the nodules and the surrounding environment off the ocean floor, will begin to remove a habitat that took 10 million years to grow.

In order to continue making sustainable LED lights above the surface, we have to destroy ecologies in the deepest and darkest places on this earth. This work brings together two entities, which at first glance have nothing to do with each other, but whose fragile future depends on each other’s demise.

↪︎ Beelden in Leiden, foto: Youtube, (Curator: Stéphanie Noach)