It’s a little unsettling to think that the ocean floor is being mapped out before a lease sale. The floor is miles below the surface, is always dark, and is under so much pressure that it would crush a car like a paper cup. Not looked into out of interest. Set up for inventory.
Most people didn’t notice that change happening quickly. In April 2025, an executive order told federal agencies to act quickly on important minerals found in the United States. Yes, they did. The Interior Department combined two offshore agencies into a new group called the Marine Minerals Administration by the middle of July of last year. They then put the first US deep-sea mineral lease on the market in federal waters off of American Samoa. There are more lease areas after this one. They are the Northern Mariana Islands, Alaska, and Virginia. Nickel, cobalt, copper, and manganese are the metals in question. These are the same ones that are in an EV battery, and China currently controls most of the world’s supply of them.
A lot less attention is paid to the work that needs to be done before even one nodule can be lifted off the ground. Someone needs to check it out. For most of deep-sea history, that meant huge, expensive submersibles attached to huge, expensive ships that were run by a small group of government agencies and top research institutions. You can only use those vehicles for a certain amount of time. They have to wait years for a spot. It was mostly just an idea to do continuous, repeated surveys over thousands of square nautical miles.
Then a business from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution began making something else. The subs owned by Orpheus Ocean are neon-colored, less than two meters long, and weigh less than 600 pounds. They have a bit of an odd look to them. They don’t move. When they land in the mud, they push into the sediment to get a sample. Then they take off, skip a few feet, and land again. The hopping motion is really strange, just like it sounds. The nodules are about 6,000 meters below the surface, though, and it works there. Each one costs about $200,000 to build. A normal deep-diving boat costs between $5 million and $10 million. It’s hard to argue with the math.
CEO and founder Jake Russell, who used to be a chemist, calls the whole thing “deep for cheap.” It makes sense: if a robot is cheap enough, losing one won’t mean the end of the program. You can send a fleet instead of just one machine that can’t be replaced. A researcher from the Scottish Association for Marine Science made a good point: small, cheap vehicles mean you don’t need a big research ship to carry them, which could one day allow countries with less money to do work in the deep sea. That’s not nothing.
On the seafloor of the Pacific, NOAA’s research ship Rainier sent two Orpheus subs to explore more than 8,000 square nautical miles. This was done in the spring, roughly between Australia and South America. Each sub took one high-resolution picture every second and took up to eight samples of rock and water per dive, which was about 10 kilometers long. That’s a lot of ground for machines that just hop.
The timing is the part that makes me feel bad. The maps are coming in at the same time that the lease sales start. It says that Orpheus is just gathering information, and there’s no reason to doubt that. But better maps are useful for both scientists and mining companies. In fact, the CEO of the company has said that every week they get questions from mining, defense, offshore energy, and telecom. It doesn’t matter who paid for the data.
They keep making the same point, and it’s important to pay attention to: these communities at the bottom, which depend on slow life cycles and poorly understood food webs, might not be able to recover from large-scale disturbances in any time frame that matters to us. There isn’t much science behind that yet. That timetable for mining is running late.
It’s possible that cheap, accurate robots could help. One ocean engineer suggested that robots with Orpheus-level accuracy could allow targeted sampling instead of bulk scooping, which would be much less harmful. That’s a good reason to hope. But the maps are coming anyway, and depending on where you stand, that’s either the right thing to do or the fastest way to find the things that are worth taking.
The lumps have been there for millions of years on the ocean floor. The robots that hop around have been down there for weeks. The lease sales have already been planned.
