Billions of tonnes of potato-shaped rocks are quietly resting on the seafloor four kilometers below the Pacific Ocean’s surface. Before the world decided it needed to go green, they had been forming for millions of years, layering cobalt, nickel, copper, and manganese into dense little nodules that no one really cared about. Suddenly, everyone is concerned. Governments are concerned. Mining firms are concerned. Additionally, the International Seabed Authority, a United Nations agency tasked with maintaining law and order down there, is witnessing the gradual erosion of its authority in real time.
Here, it’s difficult to ignore the pattern. Since 2014, the ISA has been developing a framework for commercial deep-sea mining regulations. The rulebook is still unfinished as of mid-2026, despite more than ten years of negotiations, working groups, delegate flights to Jamaica, and draft texts. In the meantime, the enormous international seabed area between Hawaii and Mexico known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone has evolved into a sort of geopolitical chessboard. There, China has contracts for exploration. India also does. Additionally, The Metals Company, a Vancouver-based business, is attempting to mine it with authorization from Washington rather than the UN.
The final section is the most important. President Trump signed an executive order in April 2025 to expedite seabed mining permits in international waters, which are completely outside the purview of the ISA. The United States never ratified the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which established the ISA and proclaimed the deep ocean to be the “common heritage of mankind.” Washington has consistently insisted that it is not constrained by that structure. The U.S. is now actively pursuing this belief, and a mining company is lining up to profit from it.
The U.S. subsidiary of The Metals Company has submitted an application to mine approximately 65,000 square kilometers of the Pacific seabed, which is more than twice the area of Vancouver Island. The application has already been found to be in compliance with American regulations by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. As early as the first quarter of 2027, a permit might be issued. No state has the authority to unilaterally exploit deep-sea minerals outside of the UNCLOS framework, ISA Secretary-General Leticia Carvalho said in response. Legally, she might be correct. Practically speaking, it’s unclear if that matters.
Observers of ocean governance believe that although the ISA’s influence has always been limited, the Trump executive order may have cracked something that is difficult to fix. Other nations keeping a close eye may conclude that the multilateral process is optional, or at least optional for those strong enough to disregard it, if the United States approves a commercial mining permit and operations start. That is an unsettling precedent that raises issues far beyond the ocean floor.
This is made even more difficult by the environmental stakes. The species that inhabit the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, the impact of sediment plumes from harvesting machines on the feeding and breathing of deep-sea organisms, and the duration of disturbances have all been openly acknowledged by researchers. The ISA itself commissioned a team of thirty scientists in 2024, and they are currently creating baseline standards for impact monitoring. They’re still not done. Mining might begin before they do.
As this develops, it becomes challenging to distinguish between the legitimate urgency surrounding critical minerals—which is real, as the IEA predicts significant shortages in copper and lithium within ten years—and the practicality of using that urgency to avoid inconvenient governance procedures. In the future, deep-sea mining might be required. The science behind that is actually disputed. However, the way it is currently being pursued, with one country unilaterally paving the way for a private company, is pushing the boundaries of international organizations that were never intended to withstand this kind of pressure.
The next council meeting of the ISA is set for July. There will be more negotiations. There will be more drafts distributed. And those nodules will remain there, just as they have for millions of years, four kilometers beneath it all, waiting, one suspects, a little less patiently than before.
