In Kingston, Jamaica, by secret ballot, an election was held earlier this month. The lands whose governance was at stake are vaster than any nation, and it’s possible the consequences of the vote will be felt for eons. More than half of the world’s ocean floor is under the jurisdiction of an intergovernmental body called the International Seabed Authority, or ISA. Its members have spent the last three decades in deliberations with a single purpose: crafting an international legal regime for a field of commercial activity that does not yet exist. Their mandate is to determine how — and whether — to allow the nations of the Earth to mine the sea.
The cold floor of the deep ocean is a place human beings know very little about. One thing we do know is that things there happen extremely slowly. The mercurial forces that condition life for the creatures of the Earth’s surface — sunlight, winds, the seasons, the weather — have little reach into the deep-sea ecosystem. When scientists visit, their machines’ tracks in the sediment are still visible a quarter-century later. The world’s oldest living organisms rely on this stability to make their home here, sheltered in darkness under the ocean’s colossal weight.
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Once in a while, a bit of organic matter from the livelier waters above makes its way down to the ocean floor: a shark’s tooth, the scale of a fish, a shell fragment. Once it’s there, minerals begin to accrete around this core. There are competing theories of the chemical process by which this occurs, but the result is a concretion that grows at the pace of a few centimeters every million years to form a small rock known as a polymetallic nodule. These are often compared to potatoes in size and shape. They’re found around the world, but the largest concentration is in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a region the size of the United States in the eastern Pacific Ocean, where trillions of nodules are strewn across the abyssal plains.
In the 1960s, an American mining engineer named John Mero publicized a tantalizing idea: that these nodules were an untapped fortune ready for the taking. Polymetallic nodules contain cobalt, nickel, manganese, and copper — metals with a range of industrial applications, most notably in steelmaking, that had played a material role in the economic growth of the U.S. and for which new mines were then desperately sought worldwide. In a 1960 article in Scientific American, and a 1965 book called The Mineral Resources of the Sea, Mero argued that, should a viable technology be devised to vacuum up the nodules at scale, it would yield cheaper access to the increasingly valuable metals than terrestrial mining — and a significantly greater store of them than could be found anywhere on land.
It’s not self-evident that allowing some companies to mine the sea would result in decreased terrestrial mining.
These claims caught the attention of both private industry and governments. In short order, the dredging technology that Mero had imagined was developed, and commercial extraction appeared imminent. All that stood in the way was the task of devising a legal framework to regulate access to the international waters in which the buried wealth lay. In 1973, the........