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Modern societies require more and more metals, not least for renewable energy generation. Scientists from a range of disciplines are needed to prospect for ore deposits and provide a basis for sustainable exploration.
The status of sea floors is an important part of healthy marine ecosystems and intact coastlines. We need laws and a sea-floor management regime to make the exploitation of marine resources sustainable.
Humans have altered their environment ever since they first appeared. Updates on three frameworks of thinking about the scale of twenty-first-century human influence on the Earth are invigorating the global change debate.
