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Minerals Report - International Seabed Authority

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5. Biological Communities and Currents on Seamounts<br />

It is essential to understand the nature of biological communities that<br />

inhabit seamounts so that that information can be incorporated into<br />

environmental impact recommendations. It is also essential to understand the<br />

movement of water masses around seamounts so that appropriate mining<br />

equipment and techniques can be developed and dispersal routes of<br />

resuspended particles and wastes can be determined. Very few studies have<br />

addressed seamount currents and biology, especially the latter. Fe-Mn crusts<br />

occur on many different kinds of topographic features throughout the global<br />

ocean, but in this section, we concentrate on seamounts of the type that occur<br />

in the equatorial Pacific, where the most economically promising Fe-Mn crust<br />

deposits occur.<br />

Seamounts obstruct the flow of oceanic water masses, thereby creating<br />

a wide array of seamount-generated currents of generally enhanced energy<br />

relative to flow away from the seamounts. Seamounts interact simultaneously<br />

with large-scale currents, mesoscale jets and eddies, and tidal flows (115), the<br />

combined effect of which produces seamount-specific currents. Those<br />

seamount-generated currents can include anticyclonic currents (Taylor<br />

column), internal waves, trapped waves, vertically propagating vortextrapped<br />

waves, Taylor caps (regions of closed circulation or stagnant water<br />

above a seamount), attached counter-rotating mesoscale eddies, and others<br />

(e.g., 116). The effects of these currents are strongest at the outer rim of the<br />

summit region of seamounts, the area where the thickest crusts are found.<br />

However, the seamount-generated currents can be traced for at least several<br />

hundred meters above the summit of seamounts. Other water column<br />

features produced by the interaction of seamounts and currents are density<br />

inversions, isotherm displacement, enhanced turbulent mixing, and up<br />

welling; the latter process moves cold, nutrient-rich waters to shallower<br />

depths. Up welling increases primary productivity, which in turn increases<br />

the size and magnitude of the OMZ, and makes seamounts ideal fishing<br />

grounds. Seamount-generated currents also cause erosion of the seamounts<br />

(and Fe-Mn crusts) and move surface sediments, which produces sand waves<br />

and ripples.<br />

INTERNATIONAL SEABED AUTHORITY 226

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