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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Around 500 miles southeast of the bright turquoise waters at Honolulu Harbor, and two and a half miles down to the dark ocean floor, a massive carpet of potato-sized rocks stretches thousands of miles on the seabed. These rocks, called polymetallic, or manganese, nodules, are made up of manganese, nickel, copper, and cobalt. The nodules' growth is one of the slowest geological processes in the world—it takes millions of years for one to grow a couple of millimeters: Tiny particles precipitate from the surface of the ocean to the seafloor and conglomerate around a core, like a rock or a shark tooth, and create a nodule.

[...] They are now the precious targets, worth millions of dollars, of an emerging deep-sea mining industry, and that's making many researchers like Craig Smith, a professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, cautious. As the head of the Smith Lab, he focuses on the seafloor ecology of various habitats, including the abyssal plains, which cover 50 percent of Earth's surface. "We assume that it is likely that more species occur in the deep sea than anywhere else on Earth," the authors of one paper wrote.

"To pick up nodules, a mining machine, kind of like a potato harvester, would come along and dig up sediment. This would disrupt the top 10 to 15 centimeters of sediment, which is most of the habitat of the seafloor," Smith tells me. "Nodule mining, because of its vastness and the slowness for the environment to recover, is basically an instantaneous wipeout of a community and ecosystem."

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