Researchers are scrambling to name thousands of these newly discovered species.
Once thought an underwater wasteland, the CCZ is now known to harbour an abundance of wildlife.
Campaigners say this biodiversity is the true treasure of Earth’s largest and least understood environment.
Interest in mining the potato-sized “nodules”, which contain metals used in technologies such as smartphone touchscreens and rechargeable batteries, has opened the way for researchers to explore the CCZ.
Scientists have scooped up sediment in box cores dropped from ships and deployed remote vehicles to take pictures and collect samples from the seafloor.
There are “huge numbers of rare species”, said Horton, adding that much of the diversity was among the creatures living in the mud.
- ‘First step’ -
The International Seabed Authority (ISA) has set a target for over a thousand species to be described by 2030 in the regions targeted by miners.
Where possible, each animal needs to be sketched, dissected and assigned a molecular “barcode” -- a sort of DNA fingerprint that allows other researchers to identify it.
“The fundamental, basic, first step in any understanding of an environment is knowing what the animals are, how many of them there are and how wide their distribution is,“ she told AFP.
Conservation group Fauna & Flora has said risks range from damage to the ocean food web, to the potential for exacerbating climate change -- by churning up sediment that stores planet-heating carbon.
- Cold War connections -
Daniel Jones, a NOC researcher who trawled the archives to pinpoint the location, said the test followed an CIA plot to recover a Russian nuclear submarine, using deep-sea mining as a cover story.
He found an old photograph of the roughly eight-metre- (26-feet-) wide machine used to harvest nodules.
Machine tracks were still clearly visible on the seafloor, he said.
The slow pace of change in the CCZ is illustrated by the nodules themselves, likely millions of years in the making.
They then grew slowly, by attracting minerals that naturally occur in the water at extremely low concentrations.
But the European Academies of Science Advisory Council (EASAC) has said the need for the nodules has been overstated and urged a mining moratorium.
“It’s a one-way street,“ he said. “Once you go down it, you won’t turn around willingly.”
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