An Underwater Competition

The costly contest for deep sea resources

Hello, dear readers!

Welcome to Notes from the Deep, your guide to deep sea mining. This new proposed industry could affect us all – but news of it often gets buried under the fast-moving political dramas of the day. I’m here to help deep sea mining news float to the top of your inbox.

Let’s begin with a breakdown of the competition for Earth’s ocean treasures.

The Game: Deep Sea Mining

Many organizations and governments want to mine the deep for valuable and rare metals, which can be used in things like electric car batteries, tech gadgets, and military defense weapons. These metals are incredibly useful for making electronics. However, the mining process might permanently damage seafloor environments.

Some would-be miners are exploring waters relatively close to shore. Each coastal country owns some offshore seabed, where it can pursue deep sea mining. Other would-be miners are looking to mine in international waters, where plans must be approved by the International Seabed Authority (ISA).

Test mining has gone on for years, in both national and international deepwater areas. (The idea of deep sea mining has actually been explored for many decades.) But commercial mining, which would let companies collect and then sell seafloor minerals, has yet to happen.

The Field: A Series of Striking Ecosystems

The deep sea is packed with life, lots of it amazing and strange.

Deep sea life tends to be delicate. It’s hard to study: many creatures fall apart when brought to the surface, away from the extreme conditions they’re used to. It’s also vulnerable to pollution. Water carries trash and pollutants really well, which is why there’s garbage in places like the Mariana Trench.

We know very little about what lives in the depths. Some 90 percent of ocean species may still be undiscovered, and the deep sea is the least-explored part of the ocean. This makes it hard to tell exactly what the impacts of deep sea mining will be.

The Players: Organizations, Businesses, Governments

There are lots of entities vying for deep sea mining approval, or benefiting from the process.

The ISA

The International Seabed Authority is in charge of both permitting mining in international waters, and protecting the ecosystems of those waters: two rather conflicting tasks.

Its funding largely comes from expensive mining permit applications (exploration permits for now, and perhaps exploitation permits in the future). In the past, the ISA has been criticized for shady practices, like preventing the media from hearing decision-making conversations.

Companies

Canada’s The Metals Company (TMC) is one of the most vocal businesses pressing for deep sea mining.

The company and its CEO, Gerard Barron, offer soundbites that have garnered them a lot of press. (Barron says that mining polymetallic nodules would be “as simple as vacuuming golf balls off a putting green.”) However, there are other deep sea mining companies that stay quieter, but have similar interests.

Countries

Countries want to profit from deep sea mining just as companies do.

Of course, it’s the 21^st century, which means countries and companies are often hopelessly intertwined. Companies can set up subsidiaries in other countries to access deep sea mining options there. Nauru, for example, is partnered with Canadian brand TMC in the push for deep sea mining. Other countries, such as Japan, have the resources to pursue mining without involving foreign companies.

The Prize: Minerals That Make Money

Polymetallic nodules are a primary mining target.

These metallic rocks take millions of years to form. If left alone, they’d slowly grow, as seawater minerals continued to accumulate. However, deep sea mining would harvest them from the seafloor – even though many species call these nodules home.

There are other sources of valuable metals, too, like deep sea mountains and hydrothermal vents that sustain incredible communities: you know, big weird tubeworms, spiky crabs, squishy little fish. The vents themselves are made of mineral deposits, while seamounts grow mineral crusts on their surfaces.

Anything we can harvest from the ocean floor, even if it’s not alive, likely plays some role in housing life. These metals have monetary and practical value on land, but life-sustaining value underwater – they’re literally habitats for many animals. Mining is almost inevitably destructive to some extent, especially in the deep sea, where ecosystems grow slowly and pollutants travel easily.

My goal in putting together this newsletter is to make it easier to stay informed on a global competition with remarkably limited news coverage, given that it stands to impact some of Earth’s biggest ecosystems.

Until next time, something to think about: the Pacific Ocean alone is over five times wider than the moon. That’s how big the ocean is. You could dunk the moon in there like a cookie in a glass of milk.