And it is not just the whales and you know it!
Blue whales are the largest animals on Earth, but that didn’t save them when commercial whaling wiped out as much as 97 percent of their numbers. Today, the aquatic giants are still considered Endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List, and while their numbers are increasing, they still face threats including vessel strikes and the climate crisis. Now, a new threat may be looming on the horizon: deep-sea mining.
Blue whales are one of the 22 to 30 species of cetaceans — the order that includes whales, dolphins and porpoises — that have been documented in the Clarion Clipperton Zone (CCZ), a region in the Pacific Ocean where testing for deep-sea mining has already begun. That’s one of the findings from a Greenpeace Research Laboratories and University of Exeter led study published in Frontiers in Marine Science this month, which researchers believe is the first to look at how deep-sea mining might impact cetaceans.
Source: Deep-Sea Mining Could Harm Whales and Dolphins, Too – EcoWatch
