In what’s now Norway, the country with the world’s second-longest coastline, Neolithic fisher-farmers once harpooned enormous bluefin tuna. As centuries passed, Norwegians refined the arduous fishing process, becoming nimble conquerors of the sea. Plentiful species like herring became staples of diet and livelihood. But in the 1960s, annual herring catches that had measured 600,000 tons suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. The population had collapsed.

The cause, it emerged later, was technological. Norwegian fishers had adopted the power block to pull in nets mechanically, massively multiplying their catches. What they didn’t realize was how these hauls tested the limits of fish populations. The herring would take nearly 20 years to recover.

Now, new technology is allowing Norway to pioneer another kind of ocean harvest—and the consequences and damage could be even more devastating and longer lasting. On January 9, 2024, its parliament voted to permit deep-sea mining exploration, with hopes of being the first country to mine the seafloor commercially for minerals like copper and cobalt. Yet where the fishing industry needs stable fish populations, this prospective mining industry—which would extract to build modern electronics—has no inherent need to preserve life. The exploitation threatens to destroy complex ecosystems before scientists have even documented the life forms at risk.

Norway’s proposed mining is extreme even compared to proposals for deep-sea mining elsewhere. Most miners in other regions, including the central Pacific and Indian Oceans, want to harvest polymetallic nodules, which are mineral aggregations on flat seafloor areas. Mining Norway’s volcanic seabed would instead use remote-controlled machinery to completely remove hydrothermal vents and strip mineral crusts off seamounts.

It takes fierce machines to pry rocky surfaces from the seafloor. So far, the companies have kept their methods and equipment clandestine. Yet the enormous robots developed for ocean mining startups elsewhere offer clues as to what may be used: heavy-duty spiked drillers and cutters designed to crush into seamounts and vents.

These seamounts and vents, even inactive ones, support a surprising amount of life that can survive at extreme depths. The minerals on the volcanic formations offer hard surfaces for animals to cling to. Anemones attach to vent chimneys; sponge grounds grow, garden-like, across seamounts. Enormous basket stars with curling tree-like limbs whorl along the seafloor.

Deep-sea ecosystems also take a remarkably long time to establish themselves. On seamounts elsewhere, explained Tina Kutti, an ecologist at Norway’s Institute of Marine Research, some corals live for 3,000 years. While those exact corals may not live on Norway’s seabed, what’s there is likely ancient, too. According to Kutti, as a general rule, deep-sea fauna “grow really, really slowly. They have slow metabolic rates because there’s not so much food.”

And then there’s all the life that’s still undiscovered. The deep sea is incredibly hard for scientists to study. Their research vessels often have to beat harsh weather, while the scientists themselves have to search out geologic formations in pitch-black water, like “children wandering around a forest at night with a flashlight, trying to count trees,” said Eoghan P. Reeves, a geochemist at the University of Bergen. Sometimes, he added, they make discoveries “about places that have been studied for years, when we shine the flashlight in a slightly different direction.”

Even in more accessible marine environments, scientists have struggled to understand how ecosystems function. In parts of the once-bountiful Oslofjord, more than 80 percent of the cod are gone, thanks to overfishing and modern pollutants. Marine experts long thought ocean fish would repopulate the fjord, but recent research suggests uniquely adapted fjord fish are effectively irreplaceable. Other species have fared worse. Today, much of the Oslofjord remains nearly lifeless.

Farther north, fishers along Norway’s coasts noticed unusually large sea urchin populations starting in 1970. The grazing echinoderms devoured kelp forests, and other marine life disappeared with the kelp habitat. Only recently have researchers learned the cause: as technology increased catches and fishers targeted more species, the urchins lost their natural predators. The kelp is slowly growing back today.

One reason for these past collapses was a pervasive belief that fish were so abundant they couldn’t be exterminated—and therefore fishing didn’t need to be regulated. Ocean science, tracing causes of collapse and possible paths to restoration, was key to recovery. Herring made a comeback in under two decades through a fishing moratorium. Urchin harvesting might return kelp forests to the country’s north and central coasts. Even the decimated Oslofjord may stand a chance, with new fisheries management.

The relatively fast recovery of life in shallower seas has been a saving grace. But the consequences of deep-sea mining could last far longer than those of overfishing, given the slow pace of the ecosystems’ regrowth. Species that die at that depth might take centuries to regenerate, according to Kutti. For some, regeneration may not even be possible.

Unlike with coastal environments, scientists are essentially starting from scratch to understand the deep sea. They currently lack the knowledge and technology to detect the damage deep-sea mining might cause—let alone regulate or mitigate it. Norway’s newly approved exploration process requires companies to conduct environmental baseline surveys. Yet these surveys will be of limited use, as they’ll only target areas with potentially attractive mineral deposits. “We have no data below 800 meters,” said Kutti. “It’s been shocking to us that the government hasn’t taken any big initiatives to start studying what fauna lives there on the seabed and in the water column.” Without independent research of the whole seafloor and how its ecosystems connect, attempts at regulation become shots in the dark.

“We [Norwegians] have a close connection to the sea, but also a history of using technology and bravery to conquer the natural power of the sea in quite brutal ways,” Truls Gulowsen, leader of the Norwegian Association for Conservation of Nature, told me.

While humans are capable of decimating ecosystems, we’re equally capable of safeguarding them by implementing restorative and protective measures. But there is another option, too: innovating away from environmentally harmful extraction. One alternative to deep-sea mining might be urban mining—recovering and recycling minerals from our built environment. Innovation isn’t just technology, after all. Sometimes, it’s the creativity to reimagine how things get done.