The Trump administration wants seafloor mining. What does that mean?

Life at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean is slow, dark and quiet. Strange creatures glitter and glow. Oxygen seeps mysteriously from lumpy, metallic rocks. There is little to disturb these deep-ocean denizens.“There’s weird life down here,” said Bethany Orcutt, a geomicrobiologist at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences.

Research in the deep sea is incredibly difficult given the extreme conditions, and rare given the price tag.

On Thursday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that aims to permit, for the first time, industrial mining of…