Hello, I'm Justin Rowlett and welcome to Business Daily, where today we are disappearing

beneath the waves to a new frontier in mining. We're all about collecting polymetallic

nodules from the ocean floor, and these nodules contain everything we need to build an electric vehicle battery.

Miners want to turn the ocean floors into a major source for metals that will power a new

greener economy. But is the devastation to the seabed worth it?

DC mining is just a really terrible idea. We're already hearing from scientists that it could cause

irreversible harm. And we're talking about totally destroying habitats where there are unique

species from nowhere else in our ocean. That's coming up on Business Daily here on the BBC.

This is a sort of hotspot of our work in deep sea biology.

This is a hydrothermal vent tube worm.

So this was found in the Cayman Shroft at about 2.5,000 metres.

This is a giant scale worm from the deep water.

You see the jaws.

It's like something from alien.

That's absolutely unbelievable.

In a laboratory at the back of London's Natural History Museum, Dr Adrian Glover

shows me a series of glass jars containing a few of the weird creatures he studies. So that's actually

its mouth, which is an inversible proboscis. It's exactly like alien. They're actually quite

big, aren't they? These are what we call the megafauna.

There's the biggest animals you'll see in the abyssal plane.

He's a zoologist who specialises in the ecology of the deep ocean. They also, they sort of crawl along.

I always think of them as sort of like the wildebeest of the seafloor.

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