Despite rapidly growing interest in deep-sea mineral exploitation, environmental research and management have focused on impacts to seafloor environments, paying little attention to pelagic ecosystems. Nonetheless, research indicates that seafloor mining will generate sediment plumes and noise at the seabed and in the water column that may have extensive ecological effects in deep midwaters (1), which can extend from an approximate depth of 200 meters to 5 kilometers. Deep midwater ecosystems represent more than 90% of the biosphere (2), contain fish biomass 100 times greater than the global annual fish catch (3), connect shallow and deep-sea ecosystems, and play key roles in carbon export (4), nutrient regeneration, and provisioning of harvestable fish stocks (5). These ecosystem services, as well as biodiversity, could be negatively affected by mining. Here we argue that deep-sea mining poses significant risks to midwater ecosystems and suggest how these risks could be evaluated more comprehensively to enable environmental resource managers and society at large to decide whether and how deep-sea mining should proceed.

中文翻译：

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意见：在评估深海采矿的环境风险时，必须考虑中水生态系统。

尽管对深海矿物开采的兴趣迅速增长，但环境研究和管理一直集中在对海底环境的影响上，很少关注远洋生态系统。尽管如此，研究表明，海底采矿将在海床和水柱中产生沉积物羽流和噪声，这可能会对深水中部水域产生广泛的生态影响（1），深水区的深度可能从200米延伸至5公里。深层中水生态系统占生物圈的90％以上（2），其鱼类生物量是全球年度鱼类捕获量的三倍（3），连接浅海和深海生态系统，并在碳出口中发挥关键作用（4），养分再生和可捕捞鱼类资源的供应（5）。这些生态系统服务以及生物多样性可能会受到采矿的负面影响。在这里，我们认为深海采矿对中水生态系统构成了重大风险，并建议了如何更全面地评估这些风险，以使环境资源管理者和整个社会能够决定是否应进行深海采矿以及如何进行。