Chapter 1: What is deep sea mining and why is it gaining interest?
Hello, everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us. Today, we're getting smarter about deep sea mining because a lot of change is happening in this fledgling industry. And many, including President Trump, say that it has a lot of potential to boost not only the U.S. economy, but also national security.
My colleague Daniel Ackerman is our resident deep sea mining expert. He's reported a bunch of stories from Marketplace on the ocean mining industry, and he writes a newsletter on this topic called Seabed Spotlight. He's here to help us out with Deep Sea Mining 101. Dan, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks, Kimberly.
So to get us started, what is exactly deep sea mining and why are people so interested in this? Well, most of the mined materials that we use in our cars and smartphones, you know, come from land. It comes from the rocks and the dirt beneath our feet. And mining all that stuff can often mean bad things like displacing communities to make an open pit mine or...
cutting down a rainforest to get at the materials underneath it. So deep sea mining is this idea that maybe we can avoid some of these problems by getting these metals from the bottom of the ocean in a remote area that's far from where anyone lives, that doesn't touch anyone's drinking water, not near a rainforest.
And, you know, there really is a lot of metal down there at the bottom of the ocean that the U.S. Geological Survey has estimated that there is more nickel, cobalt, and manganese in just one patch of the eastern Pacific Ocean than in all of the known terrestrial reserves of those metals combined. So there is kind of a big opportunity here to get a lot of metal from remote parts of the deep ocean.
How deep are we talking about and why is there so much metal down there? Yeah, so this is, it almost feels like another world to describe it. This can be under multiple miles of seawater down where there's no sunlight penetration, so it's totally dark. It is frigid temperatures, really high pressures.
And the types of deposits down there, and I'm going to warn you, I'm going to nerd out on geology here for just a minute. The types of deposits that are of most interest to mining companies are these very strange rocks called polymetallic nodules. And these, I call them strange because they don't form like other rocks. They're not, you know, formed deep within the bowels of the earth.
They actually form right on top of the seabed, on the sandy, you know, seabed surface. And they grow over time. So what happened is, you know, let's go back 10 million years. A shark is swimming through the ocean and it loses a tooth. That tooth falls to the bottom of the ocean onto the seabed.
And that organic matter, that tooth acts as kind of like a nucleus where over time, little molecules of metal that are in trace amounts in the seawater start sticking to that tooth. And then over the course of millions of years, molecule by molecule, you know, this metal gloms on and turns into a polymetallic nodule that that is kind of like the size and shape of a potato.
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Chapter 2: What are polymetallic nodules and why are they valuable?
So, I mean, back in the 1960s and 70s, so actually decades ago, there was quite a flurry of interest in deep sea mining. There were defense contractors like Lockheed here in the U.S. that were investing a lot of money into mining. kind of exploring this idea, seeing if it would be feasible, both technologically and economically, to get these metals.
But then in the 1980s, there was this big crash in metals prices. You know, the price of manganese, which is one of the metals commonly found in these nodules, dipped really low. And then suddenly all the companies like Lockheed... that were interested in this decided, nope, we're just not going to get the economic return that we need given these low metal prices.
So interest in deep sea mining really dropped off in the 80s and 90s and even 2000s. And then more recently, around the world, there's this energy transition. most countries are trying to move away from fossil fuels towards electrifying things which require batteries. Those batteries require metals like nickel and cobalt and manganese, and those materials are found in these polymetallic nodules.
So this is kind of a new uptick in interest in deep sea mining that's happened in the past decade or so. So then if deep sea mining is part of this broader race for critical minerals on land, which, and I guess even in space, because we've heard about moon mining as well, but which countries are kind of ahead on this race to mine the ocean floor?
I guess the first thing I would say is that a lot of the countries, maybe most of the countries involved in this don't actually view it as a race. This is maybe a rare area where there's been a lot of international cooperation in kind of developing the rules for a potential future deep sea mining industry.
So that said, a handful of countries have explored the possibility of deep sea mining in their own waters near their shores. So these include Papua New Guinea, Japan, Norway. The Cook Islands has been doing a lot of exploration for deep sea mining recently in the Pacific region.
And then China, they've been investing a good amount in deep sea mining technology and exploration, not necessarily in their own waters, but in international waters in the Pacific Ocean. But overall, the dynamic has really been more cooperative than it has been competitive. But that could be changing. As you mentioned at the top, the Trump administration is strongly supportive of deep sea mining.
In April, President Trump signed an executive order that basically was pushing the administration to move quickly in the area of deep sea mining, to fast track permitting for deep sea mining, and basically clear a bunch of roadblocks that would allow companies to get started sooner than later.
And that's something that has been a unilateral push by the US, not really in cooperation with anyone else. All right, we're going to pause here for a quick break, and we are going to be right back with Dan Ackerman for more on deep sea mining. All right.
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