In December 2025 and January 2026, the Chinese research vessel Shi Yan 6 appeared to be operating in the Indian Ocean inside an exploration zone contracted to India by the International Seabed Authority. The ship’s stated purpose was deep-sea research. Under the Law of the Sea, that is every state’s right in the international seabed area. But it put a Chinese survey ship directly over seabed where India holds an ISA-issued exclusive right to explore for minerals.
India declined to comment. Germany, whose own contracted zone the same vessel visited over the same period, said it was unaware the visit had occurred. The ISA is the autonomous treaty body created under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea; it issued both contracts and governs all mineral-resource activity on the ocean floor beyond national jurisdiction. It had no information on what the ship did there and no mechanism to find out.
The visit was unannounced, and it drew no response from the authority. To see how a lawful voyage can expose such a gap, start with what lies on the seabed.
The battery metal beneath the abyss
Four thousand to six thousand meters below the ocean surface, across vast stretches of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Ocean floors, the seabed is littered with what the industry calls polymetallic nodules. These potato-sized lumps of metal grow roughly one centimeter per million years. They sit loose on the sediment, dense with nickel, cobalt, copper, and manganese. They are not mined anywhere. Yet they may be the largest accessible concentration of battery-critical metals on Earth.
The Clarion-Clipperton Zone, an abyssal plain stretching across 4.5 million square kilometers or more of the eastern Pacific between Hawaii and Mexico, contains the densest known accumulation of these nodules: about 21 billion dry tonnes, by a conservative count. In a typical nodule, nickel, copper, and cobalt together come to about 2.6 percent. That is comfortably above the 2 percent grade that the ISA treats, together with nodule abundance above 5 kilograms per square meter and smooth terrain, as the mark of a sound economic proposition.
The comparison with the land dates from 2013, when the CCZ’s nodules were estimated to hold more manganese than the entire land-based reserve base of the time, roughly twice the nickel, and about three times the cobalt. By that measure, for the battery metals that matter most, the ocean floor outweighs the reserves known on land.
The global EV industry’s demand for nickel, cobalt, and manganese has been growing sharply, with no credible scenario for achieving decarbonization targets without massive expansion of battery-metal supply. Cobalt presents the sharpest supply-chain vulnerability: the Democratic Republic of Congo accounts for nearly three-quarters of global mine production, and Chinese companies control the majority of DRC processing infrastructure as well as the dominant share of global cobalt refining capacity. Manganese, nickel, and copper are somewhat less concentrated but share the general pattern: supply chains that run through a small number of jurisdictions, with Chinese processing grip at each stage.
The seabed nodules change that calculus, at least in principle. They contain all four metals in a single deposit, at depths technically accessible by purpose-built machinery, in international waters governed by a treaty body that has issued 31 exploration contracts to more than 20 state agencies and companies, sponsored by countries from across the political spectrum.
The catch is that the seabed beyond national jurisdiction belongs to no state. Its minerals are meant to be managed in common through the ISA, but the rules for extracting them are unfinished, and the authority has little reach over what other states’ ships do there.
The competition developing around this resource follows a logic already visible in the Arctic, where viable extraction technology outpaced the governance designed to manage it. Here the pattern is compressed into a shorter timeline and plays out without the residual sovereignty that Arctic states could use to anchor their claims.
Three reasons nobody has mined it yet
Extracting nodules from the abyssal plains requires purpose-built collector vehicles, hydraulic lift systems capable of moving slurry across several kilometers of vertical distance, surface processing vessels, and integrated logistics for material that comes up mixed with sediment and seawater. The capital cost before a single nodule reaches port is enormous. The technology exists in prototype: in 2022 The Metals Company ran a large-scale test in the CCZ and lifted over 3,000 tonnes of nodules. Nobody has yet deployed it commercially at scale. The engineering problem is solvable, but it is expensive, and the economics have not yet cleared the threshold.
The CCZ is almost entirely unmapped in biological terms: about 90 percent of the species found there have no scientific name.
The evidence from test sites is not reassuring. Two months after a large-scale collector trial in the CCZ, the density of small animals living in the sediment inside the machine’s tracks had fallen by more than a third, and the number of species by nearly a third. Beyond the tracks, the sediment plume did not cut animal numbers but reshuffled which species dominated. On a 1979 test-mining track in the CCZ, impacts on many groups of organisms persisted 44 years later, with only some beginning to recover. With nodules that grow as slowly as these, the habitat is non-renewable on any human timescale.
The third barrier is legal. Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the seabed and ocean floor beyond national jurisdiction is designated “the Area,” and its resources are declared the “common heritage of mankind.”
No state or private entity can claim or exercise sovereign rights over those resources. The ISA, established in 1994 when UNCLOS entered into force, is the sole body authorized to organize, regulate, and control all mineral-resource activities in the Area. It has issued 31 exploration contracts under its exploration rules, but the part of its mining code that would govern commercial extraction is still unwritten. Its Council met twice in 2026 and both times broke up without adopting the regulations, after more than a decade of negotiation.
It is being asked to authorize an industry whose effects at commercial scale on a largely unmapped ecosystem are still unknown, under rules it has not yet written. The states that must agree on those rules include sponsors of mining contractors, strategic rivals and governments answering to environmental voters at home.
The trigger clause
The 1994 Implementing Agreement contains a provision allowing any member state whose national intends to apply for a mining licence to ask the ISA to finish its regulations, triggering a two-year deadline. If the deadline passes and an application is pending, the Council must still consider it and may provisionally approve it under whatever rules then exist.
On June 25, 2021, Nauru invoked this clause. The country of about 12,000 people is the legal sponsor for NORI (Nauru Ocean Resources Inc.), a subsidiary of the Vancouver-based, Nasdaq-listed The Metals Company. The ISA's two-year deadline ran to July 9, 2023, and the ISA failed to produce a finalized mining code by that date.
The first push came from a small Pacific island state sponsoring a mining company, years before Washington issued its own challenge.China’s long game
China holds five of the ISA’s 31 exploration contracts, more than any single state actor, and is the Authority’s largest financial contributor. Together they give China an unusual combination: the largest national stake in exploration and outsized weight inside the body that determines who gets access to the resource.
Eight Chinese deep-sea vessels, followed over five years by reporters from CNN and Mongabay, spent just 6 percent of their combined open-water time in the areas where Chinese companies hold mining exploration rights. Much of the rest was spent in politically sensitive waters, such as those near Guam and in areas overlapping contested claims near Taiwan, and in submarine transit corridors of strategic significance.
The Shi Yan 6 was not the only Chinese ship that appeared to work in other countries’ areas. The Shen Hai Yi Hao lingered in South Korea’s area in late 2025, and in 2024 it had worked around the areas contracted to France, Poland, and Russia. France, Poland, and South Korea said China had told them in advance, and that such research is allowed under the Law of the Sea. Russia did not respond.
The ISA can fine its own contractors and suspend or terminate their contracts. But it has no mechanism for tracking another state’s research vessels, and no procedure for receiving, processing, or acting on a complaint that a vessel has entered a contracted zone without the contractor’s knowledge.
China’s behavior within the ISA’s governance structure mirrors its operational behavior at sea. At the July 2023 ISA Assembly, a coalition led by Chile, Costa Rica, and France sought a formal debate on a precautionary pause on deep-sea mining. China held out alone against putting it on the agenda at all, with its negotiator calling the item “not suitable” for discussion. The compromise kept the pause off that year’s agenda and parked it, provisionally, on the next.
Most analysts the reporters interviewed believe that, during their time away from the contract areas, the vessels collect information that could include military intelligence. Seabed mapping in submarine transit corridors yields acoustic and terrain data. Sediment and current measurements near choke points are precisely the kind of persistent environmental data that submarine warfare planning requires. The vessels carry the equipment to do all of this. None of it proves a military role on its own, but together it points to ships that serve strategic as well as scientific ends.
China is doing what a rational state would do in its position. Its contracts give it a legitimate seat inside the ISA, the law of the sea lets its ships work almost anywhere in international waters, and the 6 percent figure shows how small a share of these ships’ time at sea goes to the mining areas that anchor China’s place in the Authority. Whatever its motives, China helps maintain the void, most visibly by blocking even a debate on a precautionary pause.
Norway’s detour
If China were the whole problem, a state with clear authority and strong institutions should be able to do better on its own seabed. Norway looked like the state best placed to show it.
In January 2024, the Norwegian Parliament voted to open a stretch of continental shelf about half the land area of France, mostly Arctic waters between Svalbard, Greenland, and Iceland, to seabed mineral exploration. The vote made Norway, briefly, the most consequential jurisdiction in the global deep-sea mining debate.
Norway’s legal position was far clearer than the ISA’s. Under UNCLOS, coastal states hold sovereign rights over the natural resources of their continental shelf. Norway was operating outside the Area and beyond ISA jurisdiction, so it did not depend on an unfinished mining code. About a third of the opened area does lie on the shelf around Svalbard, where states dispute whether the Svalbard Treaty’s terms govern how Norway exercises that authority, but no one argued the ISA had a say. Norway had full capacity to design and implement a regulatory framework.
In June 2024, the Ministry of Energy published a licensing proposal covering more than a third of the area Parliament had opened, and put it out for public consultation. About forty of the seventy-odd responses expressed clear opposition. Environmental groups, scientists, trade unions, fishing organizations, and the government’s own Environment Agency registered objections, and the European Parliament had already passed a resolution criticizing the plan soon after the January vote. Norway reviewed the technical evidence and appeared to be moving toward a first licensing round in 2025.
It never came. In December 2024, the minority government needed the Socialist Left Party’s votes to pass its budget, and the Socialist Left’s price was halting the licensing round. A year later the pause hardened. After a budget deal with the Socialist Left, the Greens, the Red Party, and the Centre Party, the Labour government announced that no deep-sea mining licences would be issued before the parliamentary term ends in 2029. International environmental criticism had built throughout the year. UN human rights experts subsequently commended the decision.
One Norwegian company that had positioned for the licensing round, Loke Marine Minerals, had already filed for bankruptcy in April 2025, months before the December 2025 decision. Others dug in, waiting for the political calculus to shift after the current parliamentary period.
Whatever one makes of Norway’s environmental call, few states came to this resource with clearer authority or stronger institutions for managing it. Its regulatory process was underway, and still the licensing plan did not survive a single parliamentary cycle: the first round was halted within twelve months of the vote.
Supporters of the pause see a democracy changing course as it should. Either way, a state with every institutional advantage did not hold a seabed-mining policy steady long enough to issue a single licence.
The US gamble
The United States helped negotiate UNCLOS and treats much of it as binding customary international law. The Senate has never ratified the treaty. The original obstacle was Part XI: in 1982 the US refused to sign, objecting to the deep-seabed mining regime, which critics read as a redistributive mechanism that would constrain American companies and transfer technology and revenue to developing nations. The 1994 Implementing Agreement significantly modified Part XI. It dropped mandatory technology transfer, restructured the ISA’s own mining arm and adjusted Council voting in favor of industrialized states. The US signed that agreement, and it was still not enough. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee twice recommended ratification, but the treaty never reached a floor vote, and a final push in 2012 stalled in committee.
The result was that the United States kept a 1980 domestic statute, the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act, as its operative legal framework for American companies wishing to mine the international seabed. The Act established a permitting process under US national authority, without reference to the ISA. For decades it sat in effective irrelevance, because commercial mining wasn’t yet viable and the political moment hadn’t arrived.
In April 2025, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Unleashing America’s Offshore Critical Minerals and Resources.” The order made it US policy to advance American leadership in seabed mineral development and directed NOAA to fast-track, within 60 days, exploration licences and commercial recovery permits under the 1980 Act in areas “beyond national jurisdiction.”
The phrase “beyond national jurisdiction” is an explicit assertion of the right to mine the Area without ISA authorization.
Leticia Carvalho, the ISA’s Secretary-General and the first woman and first Latin American to lead the Authority, responded with a formal statement: “No State has the right to unilaterally exploit the mineral resources of the Area outside the legal framework established by UNCLOS.” China’s foreign ministry condemned the order as a violation of international law. When it was signed, 32 countries had already called for a moratorium or precautionary pause on deep-sea mining; by August 2026, 46 countries backed a moratorium, a pause, or an outright ban. Days after the order, The Metals Company’s US subsidiary applied to NOAA for a commercial recovery permit. NOAA has since found its expanded application fully compliant with the 1980 Act’s information requirements and opened it to public comment until October 19, 2026. Certification and a full environmental review still lie ahead, and the company expects a decision on the first US permit to mine the international seabed by early 2027.
The legal exposure is real. Two lawyers have argued that UNCLOS Article 137(3) may oblige all states parties to treat minerals recovered from the Area under a US permit as effectively untouchable: receiving, processing, purchasing, or otherwise dealing with them would amount to “recognition” of a claim the Convention explicitly prohibits. If that holds, any nodule extracted under a US domestic permit and shipped to a port in an UNCLOS-ratifying jurisdiction, which is most of them, faces a potential legal challenge. The US is betting that critical mineral demand will override legal objections.
The order also sets a precedent. Asserting the right to bypass ISA authority is functionally claiming that the “common heritage” principle is void — that resources beyond national jurisdiction are available to whoever has the technology and the political will to extract them first. That precedent does not stay confined to the deep seabed. It applies to every subsequent ungoverned space where technological capability precedes institutional authority.
The 1982 commons and its 2025 problem
UNCLOS Part XI was negotiated through the 1970s in the Cold War’s North-South context. The developing world’s concern, articulated most sharply by Maltese ambassador Arvid Pardo in his speech to the UN General Assembly on November 1, 1967, was specific and historically grounded: the states with the technology to exploit the deep seabed would do so, and the rest of the world would receive nothing. Pardo proposed the seabed as “the common heritage of mankind” — a legal category designed to prevent exactly the kind of first-mover appropriation that had characterized every previous resource frontier.
The ISA was the institutional solution. Its job was to manage the Area’s resources collectively and share the benefits with all states, so that the deep seabed did not become another zone of technological enclosure. The design was ambitious: a global commons, administered by a treaty body, with mandatory benefit-sharing and a dedicated mining arm, the Enterprise, so that developing nations could participate directly rather than merely receive royalties.
The 1994 Implementing Agreement, negotiated under pressure from the United States, substantially modified this architecture. The Enterprise was restructured into a paper institution rather than an operational one, and the Council’s voting rules were adjusted to give major industrialized states effective veto power over unwanted decisions.
What remained was an institution with contradictory mandates, told to facilitate exploitation and to protect the marine environment at once, financed partly by fees from the contractors it regulates, and operating under a voting structure that gives both major industrial powers and major developing powers mutual veto rights. On contentious questions, that structure makes gridlock easy. The exploitation rules remain unfinished because the states around the table still disagree on liability, environmental standards and how to share the revenue, and any bloc can hold out.
Nauru’s use of the trigger clause was a stress test, and the ISA missed the resulting deadline.
The comparison to the Arctic is most useful for what it shows about how rules get built. Arctic governance was built incrementally, as exploitation technology developed, by states that had territorial and legal stakes in the outcome.
Its pieces are the Arctic Council, the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf processes, and the bilateral and multilateral agreements that regulate shipping, fishing, and resource extraction. The process was contentious and slow, and the result is incomplete. The melting of Arctic sea ice has exposed its inadequacies in real time. But it was built by parties who faced domestic constituencies for both exploitation and protection, and whose sovereign rights gave each of them specific claims to defend and enforce.
The deep seabed governance model was designed in a single negotiation, concluded in 1982 and revised in 1994, before mining was commercially viable, by states whose relationship to the resource was primarily ideological. The Arctic is a cautionary tale about how resource commons get carved up when governance trails technology. The deep seabed is following the same trajectory, compressed into a shorter timeline and without even the Arctic’s residual sovereignty anchors, and the carving has already begun.
That is where the Shi Yan 6 fits: a vessel from the state that holds more ISA exploration contracts than any other, apparently operating inside another state’s contracted area on research that is every state’s right, while the ISA had no procedure for tracking it or for India to complain. The institution meant to govern that seabed was built before commercial mining had proven viable, and assumed that major powers would stay committed to collective management long enough for the rules to mature.
The ISA’s formal rebuke of the US executive order is legally sound, but the ISA cannot stop a state from mining outside its system. It can record that the mining was not authorized; what that record is worth depends on whether other states refuse the metals.
Whether the “common heritage of mankind” principle constrains anyone in practice is being decided now: in ISA Assembly sessions where even a debate on a pause struggles to reach the agenda, in executive orders that assert rights the Convention explicitly denies, and in the logbooks of research vessels that spend 94 percent of their time outside the mining areas that justify their presence.
The ocean floor is the new Arctic because its appropriation follows the same logic, and it is arguably less reversible. The Metals Company expects a decision on its US permit by early 2027. The first port that accepts nodules mined under it will give the common-heritage principle its first real test.
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Media
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