Like most modern human endeavours, they originate in pulp science fiction. The idea of deep-sea mining (DSM), for example, dates back to Jules Verne’s 1870 classic, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
It tells the story of Professor Pierre Aronnax and his companions, who are held captive on the submarine Nautilus by the enigmatic Captain Nemo.
Later in 1957, Arthur C Clarke published The Deep Range, which imagined a future where nations divided and managed ocean resources like terrestrial territories.
In 2025, advances in AI robotics have taken commercial sea-bed mining from sci-fi to a reality, and like space mining, there’s plenty of money and resources being thrown at DSM.
Yet with start ups, the first few attempts usually fall over.
Canadian-based company, Nautilus Minerals, was the first to be granted a deep-sea mining lease and planned to extract copper and gold off Papua New Guinea’s coast.
The project ultimately failed in 2019, with Nautilus Minerals meeting a similar fate to the fictitious Nautilus – it disappeared and was gobbled up by a bigger DSM corporation.
What’s stopping DSM is the International Seabed Authority (ISA), who are figuring out how regulations will work for commercial operations.
Arthur C Clarke’s 1957 premonitions about a global body carving up the Earth’s seabed was fairly accurate, because that is what the ISA was established to do.
According to www.isa.org.jm, it was established under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and came into existence in 1994.
Its HQ is in Kingston, Jamaica, hence the ‘jm’ website suffix.
There are 36 members elected by an assembly, says ISA, and they are made up of ‘state parties’ with special (i.e. vested) interests in mineral consumption and exports.
Suffice to say it’s a complicated organisational structure which covers geographical regions of ‘Africa, Asia-Pacific, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Western Europe and others’.
Fun fact
While land-locked countries like Austria and Azerbaijan are members, the US is not, apparently because it chooses not to ratify the UNCLOS treaty.
ISA say it organises and controls ‘all mineral-resources-related activities in the area for the benefit of humankind as a whole’.
As such, it has ‘the mandate to ensure the effective protection of the marine environment from harmful effects that may arise from deep-seabed-related activities’.
This is where science, as uncomfortable as it is, comes in.
As the Surfrider Foundation and the CSRIO point out, the environmental risk wth DSM is enormous and unknown.
Fiction often dramatises the consequences of high-tech human exploits in uncharted territories, yet it’s scientists who warn of irreversible harm to unique ecosystems.
And miners have a habit of launching themselves at projects before fully understanding the consequences.
For example, in 2020, Rio Tinto destroyed significant Aboriginal cultural heritage sites in WA, most notably the Juukan Gorge rock shelters.
These shelters, with evidence of human occupation dating back 46,000 years, were ‘legally’ destroyed to expand an iron ore mine.
Deep-sea mining needs to be stopped before it starts.
Hans Lovejoy, editor
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