Two miles below the surface of the Pacific, somewhere between Hawaii and Mexico, the seafloor is covered in what look like blackened potatoes. They’re called polymetallic nodules, and they’ve been sitting there, untouched, for millions of years. For most of human history, nobody could reach them. Now everyone wants to.
Walk through the lobby of any defense contractor or critical-minerals startup in Washington this spring, and you can almost feel the shift. Last April, President Trump signed an executive order pushing federal agencies to fast-track a deep-sea mining industry. In January, NOAA finalized a rule that consolidated exploration licenses and commercial recovery permit applications into a single process. Within a day, the American arm of a Canadian outfit called The Metals Co. filed a consolidated application to mine nodules in the Pacific. Five days after the executive order, they’d already filed their first paperwork. Gerard Barron, TMC’s CEO, has been telling investors he’s been waiting more than a decade for this moment.
He’s not alone. An Associated Press review found at least nine companies in talks with the government over access to seabed minerals, with sections of seafloor from American Samoa to Alaska possibly auctioned this summer and fall. Some are familiar names. Lockheed Martin still holds the only two active U.S. exploration licenses, granted in 1984 — paperwork that sat in a drawer for forty years until, somehow, it became valuable again. The defense giant had even tried to exit, selling its UK seabed subsidiary in 2023. When that buyer went bankrupt, the licenses came right back to Lockheed.
Others are stranger. There’s Impossible Metals, a California startup pitching itself as the ethical option, with autonomous underwater robots that hover over the seafloor and pick up nodules using AI vision — “avoiding all visible life,” as the company puts it in a video on its website. There’s Texas-based American Metal Resources, led by Robert Heydon, who co-founded DeepGreen Resources, the predecessor to TMC, more than a decade ago with his father. There’s Deep Sea Rare Minerals, American Ocean Minerals Corporation, SeaX. Names you’ve probably never heard, files quietly moving through regulators in Silver Spring.
The numbers are wild enough to explain the rush. A 2024 analysis by Arthur D. Little estimated the global value of undersea metals at $20 trillion. The U.S. government estimates over 1 billion metric tons of nodules sit in American-licensed zones, with the potential to add $300 billion to GDP and 100,000 jobs over ten years. TMC’s stock has climbed sharply on regulatory news this year, with analysts setting price targets well above current levels — for a company that, so far, has never sold a single ton of nodules commercially.
There’s a sense, watching this unfold, that something has flipped. For years, the U.S. mostly stayed on the sidelines, kept out of the International Seabed Authority by its refusal to ratify the Law of the Sea treaty. China, meanwhile, locked up five international exploration contracts and a near-monopoly on critical-mineral processing. The argument for moving now is essentially geopolitical. If Beijing controls the supply chains for nickel, cobalt, manganese and copper, every American battery, missile and EV motor flows through Chinese hands. So Washington is going around the treaty entirely, leaning on a dusty 1980 statute called DSHMRA.
Whether the science supports any of this is a different question. Forty countries, more than 950 scientists, and corporations like Apple and Google have backed a moratorium. American Samoa, California, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington have banned the practice in their own waters. The deep ocean remains the largest unexplored habitat on Earth, and even the engineers building the vacuums admit they don’t fully know what they’d be destroying.
But the permits are being written. The auctions are coming. It’s hard not to notice how quickly the framing has shifted from “should we?” to “how fast can we?” — and how few people, outside a handful of regulators and Pacific island leaders, are watching closely.
