The geopolitics of the deep sea: why the ocean floor is the new Arctic

In December 2025, the Chinese research vessel Shi Yan 6 was 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. Its actual presence — hull over the seabed, instruments presumably running — was inside a zone over which India holds an ISA-issued exclusive exploration right.

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 — the United Nations body that issued both contracts and that nominally governs all mineral-resource activity on the ocean floor beyond national jurisdiction — had no mechanism to investigate, no authority to sanction, and no formal process to even record the incursion as a violation. Institutional silence was not a failure of the response. It was the response.

One vessel. One documented entry into another state’s contracted area. One institutional void where governance was supposed to be.

The question the scene refuses to answer is not whether this matters. It is why this is allowed. And what, precisely, the ISA is for.

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. Potato-sized accretions of metal that have been building up over geological time — roughly one centimeter per million years — they sit unattached on the sediment, dense with nickel, cobalt, copper, and manganese. They are not mined anywhere. Yet they represent what may be the largest accessible concentration of battery-critical metals on Earth.

The Clarion-Clipperton Zone, an abyssal plain stretching approximately 4.5 million square kilometers across the eastern Pacific between Hawaii and Mexico — an area roughly the size of the continental United States minus Alaska — contains the densest known accumulation of these nodules. The ISA estimates the zone holds approximately 21 billion metric tons of nodules in total, representing 5.95 billion tonnes of manganese, 0.27 billion tonnes of nickel, 0.23 billion tonnes of copper, and 0.05 billion tonnes of cobalt. Individual nodules typically run at around 1.3 percent nickel, 1 percent copper, 0.2 percent cobalt, and 27 to 30 percent manganese — grade figures competitive with the laterite nickel deposits currently being mined on land.

In 2022, researchers Daina Paulikas and colleagues published a comparative systems analysis in the Journal of Industrial Ecology examining CCZ polymetallic nodules against conventional land ores for battery-metal supply chains. Their finding: the CCZ contains between 3.4 and 5 times more cobalt than all known land-based reserves, and between 1.8 and 3 times more nickel. The ocean floor’s total metal endowment is not a marginal supplement to the terrestrial resource base. It is larger than it.

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 roughly 70 percent of global 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 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 UN body that has issued contracts to 31 parties from across the state spectrum.

In principle.

The competition developing around this resource follows a pattern already visible in the Arctic — viable extraction technology outpacing the governance architecture designed to manage it — but compressed into a shorter timeline, and without the residual sovereignty anchors that Arctic states could use to anchor their claims. The seabed beyond national jurisdiction belongs to no state, which means it is available to everyone, which means the institutional vacuum at its center is not an inconvenience. It is the central geopolitical fact.

Three reasons nobody has mined it yet

Three barriers stand between the current exploration rush and commercial production. They are not equal. Each is more important than the one before it.

Extracting nodules from 4,000 to 6,000 meters requires purpose-built collector vehicles operating on abyssal plains, 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 estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The technology exists in prototype and demonstration form — The Metals Company conducted a large-scale test in the CCZ in 2022, recovering over 3,000 tonnes of nodules — but has not been commercially deployed at scale. The engineering problem is solvable. It is simply expensive, and the economics have not yet cleared the threshold.

The CCZ is almost entirely unmapped in biological terms. A 2023 study from London’s Natural History Museum, drawing on ISA contractor data, found that approximately 90 percent of species in prospective deep-sea mining zones are scientifically unnamed — not poorly understood, not under-studied, but lacking scientific names. This is not a statement about remote possibility. It is a statement about the baseline: the industry is being proposed for an ecosystem where the majority of resident species have not been documented to the level of receiving a name.

The data on what happens when mining occurs is not reassuring. A paper published in Nature Ecology and Evolution in December 2025 examined macrofaunal communities at a CCZ mining test site two months after a large-scale collector trial. Macrofaunal density within the machine’s tracks had decreased by 37 percent. Species richness had fallen by 32 percent. The effects extended into areas impacted by sediment plumes beyond the direct mining tracks. A separate Nature study examining sites from historical test mining operations found that biological impacts persisted across most organism groups over four decades after the original disturbance. The nodules themselves grow at roughly one centimeter per million years. On any human timescale, the habitat is non-renewable.

The third barrier is legal. It is the one that actually governs the crisis.

Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the seabed and ocean floor beyond national jurisdiction is designated “the Area.” The Area’s resources are declared the “common heritage of mankind.” No state or private entity can claim or exercise sovereign rights over them. 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. As of mid-2026, the ISA has issued 31 exploration contracts and has not finalized a mining code. The 31st ISA Council session met in March 2026 without completing the regulations; the second part of the session is expected in July 2026. The mining code has been under negotiation for over a decade.

This is not a technicality. An institution created to govern an entire category of global resource activity has been unable to produce its foundational regulatory instrument. The ISA is being asked to authorize an industry whose effects on a largely unmapped ecosystem are empirically unknown, under rules it has not yet written, in a political environment where the major contractors have commercial interests, strategic competitors, and domestic environmental constituencies simultaneously in the negotiating room.

It was not designed for this moment. The evidence is that it cannot produce the document the moment requires.

The trigger clause

The 1994 Implementing Agreement contains a provision allowing any ISA contractor to notify the body of readiness to begin commercial operations, triggering a mandatory two-year deadline for the ISA to complete its regulations — or watch the applicant proceed under whatever rules then exist.
On June 25, 2021, Nauru — a Pacific island state of approximately 10,000 people acting as legal sponsor for The Metals Company, a Vancouver-listed mining firm, and its subsidiary NORI (Nauru Ocean Resources Inc.) — invoked this clause. The ISA's two-year deadline ran to July 2023. The ISA failed to produce a finalized mining code by that date.
The governance crisis was not initiated by Trump or China. A small Pacific island state, representing a mining company, broke the institutional logjam first — and the system failed before the great powers even tested it.

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 something no other state has: operational access to the resource and structural leverage over the body that determines who gets access to it.

The CNN and Mongabay investigation published in March 2026, which tracked eight Chinese deep-sea vessels over a five-year period from January 2021 to January 2026, found that these vessels spent just 6 percent of their combined open-water time in or near the ISA-designated areas where Chinese companies hold mining exploration rights. The other 94 percent of their operating time was spent elsewhere: in waters near Guam, in areas overlapping contested claims near Taiwan, in submarine transit corridors of strategic significance.

The Tansuo 3, commissioned in December 2024, is designed to operate across most of the world’s oceans, including Arctic waters. In December 2025 and January 2026, the Shi Yan 6 was documented operating inside India’s and Germany’s contracted areas. In November 2025, the Shen Hai Yi Hao was observed in South Korea’s area. In 2024, Chinese vessels operated inside France’s, Poland’s, and Russia’s contracted areas.

The ISA has no investigation mechanism. No enforcement authority. 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. In 2023, China opposed the creation of an independent inspection body within the ISA. China — together with Russia and South Korea — blocked motions that would have put a discussion of a precautionary pause on deep-sea mining on the ISA’s official agenda, with China’s delegation characterizing the moratorium proposal as procedurally improper for agenda inclusion. The moratorium motion, brought by Chile, Costa Rica, France, Palau, and Vanuatu, was not placed on the agenda of the July 2023 ISA Assembly meeting.

The analysts’ consensus on what the vessels are doing during the 94 percent of time spent away from contracted areas is not ambiguous. The ocean floor in submarine transit corridors provides acoustic signature data; sediment mapping in contested areas produces intelligence with direct military applications; research in choke points yields precisely the kind of persistent environmental data that submarine warfare planning requires. The vessels carry the equipment to do all of this. The ISA framework provides the legal cover.

China is doing exactly what any rational state actor would do in the same governance vacuum: using a legitimate institutional position to maintain operational access, and using its position within the governing institution to prevent the adoption of rules that would constrain that access. This is not threat inflation. The 6 percent figure is not a statistical curiosity. It is a direct measurement of the gap between the stated purpose of China’s ISA participation and its actual operational behavior.

The correct frame is not threat narrative. It is governance capture. China is not simply filling a void. It is actively maintaining the void by opposing the institutional reforms — independent inspection, moratorium deliberation, binding environmental standards — that would require it to behave differently.

Norway’s detour

If the problem were simply China, the solution would be legible: better institutional design, actual enforcement capability, states willing to resist the void. Norway was the test of that proposition.

On January 9, 2024, the Norwegian Parliament voted 80 to 20 to open 281,200 square kilometers of continental shelf — roughly half the land area of France, primarily 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 unambiguous in a way that the ISA framework is not. Under UNCLOS, coastal states hold sovereign rights over the natural resources of their continental shelf. Norway was not operating within the Area, not subject to ISA jurisdiction, and not dependent on a mining code that did not exist. It was exercising its own national authority under well-established legal precedent, with full capacity to design and implement a regulatory framework.

In June 2024, the Ministry of Energy published a licensing proposal covering 386 blocks totaling approximately 106,000 square kilometers — about 38 percent of the area Parliament had opened — and initiated a public consultation. The consultation drew more than seventy responses, with approximately forty expressing clear opposition. Environmental groups, scientific bodies, and a range of European governments registered objections. Norway held consultations, reviewed the technical evidence, and appeared to be moving toward a licensing round.

On December 3, 2025, Norway announced it would halt all deep-sea mining plans until at least 2029. The decision emerged from a budget compromise: the minority government needed support from the Socialist Left Party to pass its state budget, and the Socialist Left’s price was a moratorium. 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 formal halt. Others dug in, waiting for the political calculus to shift after the current parliamentary period.

The structural point is not about whether Norway made the right environmental call. The point is about institutional capacity. Norway — the state with the most unambiguous legal authority, the most developed institutional capacity for resource governance, and the most serious environmental track record of any nation that approached this resource — could not maintain political commitment through a single parliamentary cycle. The legal framework was clear. The sovereignty was uncontested. The regulatory process was underway.

None of that was sufficient to hold the decision together for twelve months.

Good intentions don’t solve it. Neither does a functioning democracy with serious regulatory institutions. If those conditions were enough, Norway would now be building a licensing framework. It’s not.

The US gamble

The United States negotiated UNCLOS and considers most of its provisions binding as customary international law. The Senate has never ratified the treaty. The specific obstacle in 1994, when ratification was last seriously attempted, was Part XI: Senate Republicans would not accept the ISA’s authority over resource allocation in the Area. The ISA, in their reading, was a redistributive mechanism that would constrain American companies and transfer technology and revenue to developing nations. The 1994 Implementing Agreement significantly modified Part XI — reducing technology-sharing requirements, restructuring the ISA’s own mining arm, adjusting Council voting weights in favor of industrialized states — but it was not enough. The US signed the Implementing Agreement. It never ratified.

The result was that the United States retained 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 the technology wasn’t ready and the political moment hadn’t arrived.

On April 24, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14285: “Unleashing America’s Offshore Critical Minerals and Resources.” The order directed federal agencies to expedite permits under the 1980 Act and declared it national policy to assert US leadership in deep-seabed mineral development “within and beyond national jurisdiction.”

The phrase “beyond national jurisdiction” is not ambiguous. It is an explicit assertion of the right to mine the Area without ISA authorization.

ISA Secretary-General Leticia Carvalho — who took office on January 1, 2025, as the first woman and the 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 and the EU coordinated criticism of the order. By the time the EO was signed, 32 countries had already called for a moratorium on deep-sea mining; the executive order intensified that opposition without providing any mechanism to prevent what it asserted.

The legal exposure under the EJIL commentary that followed is real. A post on the EJIL Talk blog — “Untouchable Metals: How the Obligations of UNCLOS States Parties Limit the Commercial Viability of Unilateral Deep Sea Mining” — argued that UNCLOS Article 137(3) may obligate all states parties to treat minerals recovered from the Area under a US permit as effectively untouchable: that receiving, processing, purchasing, or otherwise dealing with such minerals would constitute “recognition” of a claim the Convention explicitly prohibits. If that analysis 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 overrides legal objections. That is a plausible bet. It is not a safe one.

The deeper cost is not legal exposure. It is precedential. 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 US executive order is not an aberration. It is the logical endpoint of a 44-year failure to build institutions capable of governing the deep seabed. The EO did not break the system. It announced that the system was already broken.

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 simply 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. Collectively manage the Area’s resources, share the benefits with all states, ensure that the deep seabed did not become another zone of technological enclosure. The design was genuinely ambitious. A global commons, administered by a treaty body, with mandatory benefit-sharing and a dedicated mining arm — the Enterprise — to ensure developing nations could participate directly, not merely receive royalties.

The 1994 Implementing Agreement substantially modified this architecture. Under pressure from the United States, the technology-sharing requirements were reduced, 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. The US signed the Implementing Agreement and still did not ratify.

What remained was an institution with contradictory mandates — simultaneously tasked with facilitating exploitation and protecting the marine environment — 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. Every contentious vote produces gridlock. The mining code remains unfinished in mid-2026 not because negotiators have been insufficiently diligent, but because no vote configuration can produce simultaneous agreement on the liability regime, the environmental standards, and the revenue-sharing formula. The interests in the room are genuinely incompatible on each of those questions.

The ISA’s failure to produce a mining code is not a temporary delay. The institution was not designed to produce one under political conditions where states have commercial interests, environmental constituencies, and strategic competitors simultaneously present. The trigger clause invoked by Nauru in June 2021 — and the ISA’s failure to meet the resulting July 2023 deadline — was not a stress test the institution passed imperfectly. It was a stress test the institution failed.

The comparison to the Arctic is instructive, but not in the way it is usually deployed.

Arctic governance — the Arctic Council, the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf processes, the bilateral and multilateral agreements that regulate shipping, fishing, and resource extraction — was built incrementally, as exploitation technology developed, by states that had territorial and legal stakes in the outcome. It was contentious, slow, and incomplete. The melting of Arctic sea ice has exposed its inadequacies in real time. But it was built by parties who had skin in the game, who faced domestic constituencies for both exploitation and protection, and who were operating within a residual sovereignty architecture that gave each of them specific claims to defend and enforce.

The deep seabed governance model was built all at once, in 1982, before the technology existed, by states whose relationship to the resource was primarily ideological. The Arctic is not a model for what could have been done better in the deep sea. It 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, without even the Arctic’s residual sovereignty anchors — and the carving has already begun.

Return to the Indian Ocean, December 2025. Shi Yan 6, hull over sediment, inside India’s contracted zone. Germany’s zone visited over the same period. The ISA with no mechanism to respond.

What that scene contains, visible now from the full context: not a protocol breach. Not a diplomatic incident that fell through the cracks. The functional definition of the governance crisis in miniature — a vessel from the state that holds more ISA exploration contracts than any other, operating inside another state’s contracted area, with no institutional response available. Not because anyone forgot to write the rule. Because the institution designed to enforce it was built for a world that assumed the technology was generations away, and assumed that major powers would remain invested in the fiction of collective management long enough for the rules to mature.

The ISA’s formal rebuke of the US executive order — “no State has the right to unilaterally exploit the mineral resources of the Area” — is legally correct. It is operationally meaningless. The ISA cannot prevent exploitation. It can document that exploitation was not authorized. That is not governance. That is record-keeping.

Whether any version of the “common heritage of mankind” principle survives its first real test — not as aspiration but as operational constraint — is being decided now. In the margins of ISA Council sessions where moratorium motions cannot reach the agenda. In the wake of executive orders that assert rights the Convention explicitly denies. In the logbooks of vessels that spend 94 percent of their time somewhere other than where they claim to be going.

The principle was designed to prevent exactly what is now beginning. Whether the design was ever adequate to the task is the question the next decade will answer — not in declarations, but in the distribution of metals that come up from the bottom of the sea. The ocean floor is the new Arctic not because it is cold or remote. It is the new Arctic because the process of its appropriation is structurally identical, and arguably less reversible.

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Media

The “Can­de­labra” black smoker at a wa­ter depth of 3,300 meters in the Log­atchev Hy­dro­thermal Field on the Mid-At­lantic Ridge – Wikipedia

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