Should We Mine The Deep Sea?

A Robot the size of a large bulldozer creeps along the bottom of the deep sea. It slurps up chunks of metallic rock and soft mud.

- Kathryn Hulick

The stuff travels up a long tube to a ship, where workers and machinery separate out the rock and dump the mud back into the ocean. This is a mining operation. The rock contains a mixture of metals, including ones called rare earth metals. People use these materials to make batteries, magnets, and electronics like computers and phones.