The world’s first deep-sea mining test was conducted by US company Deepsea Ventures in July 1970. A vacuum-cleaner-like machine bulldozed through the abyss and sucked up 60,000 baseball-sized lumps off the bottom of the ocean. The nodules – filled with manganese, nickel and cobalt that accumulate a few millimetres per million years – were hoped to become a resource for the nation’s industrial endeavours. There remains high interest in them today, as they’re replete with minerals for making batteries for electric cars and smartphones, as well as medical and military technology.

Deepsea Ventures’ project fell through, and no more deep-sea mining was done off the US East Coast. But a remote-controlled robot sent to that segment of the Blake Plateau during a 2022 scientific expedition found the company’s footprints. Scientists snapped pictures of defined dredge lines in the mud for more than 43km (27 miles). The lines dug into the abyss like train tracks, as if somebody had raked through it just recently, and the damage was “widespread and definable”, according to reports. Where the tracks are, there is nothing: no nodules and no biodiversity. No curious squid. Nothing like the kaleidoscope of beauty Joye encountered in 2018, just around the corner.