The region is called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. It is approximately six million square kilometres of abyssal plain stretching between Mexico and Hawaii, roughly the width of the continental United States, with an average depth of around 5,000 metres. The seafloor across this region is, in places, densely covered in polymetallic nodules: dark, rounded, mineral-rich rocks roughly the size of an apple or a small potato. They sit on the sediment surface like scattered eggs across a vast muddy plain. The closest light from the surface has not reached them in at least four billion years.
The nodules took millions of years to form.
Each one began as a fragment of shell, bone, or hardened sediment on the abyssal floor. Around that nucleus, dissolved metals in the surrounding seawater and porewater have, layer by layer, slowly precipitated and crystallised. The growth rate is approximately a few millimetres per million years. The nodules currently lying on the Pacific seabed are, in some cases, older than the species of human looking at them. Some are older than the species of primate that humans descended from. Each nodule, on the strongest current dating estimates, is between 2 and 10 million years old at minimum.
What the rocks actually are
The mineral content varies by region, but the nodules in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone are particularly rich in four metals that the global energy transition depends on. Each nodule is approximately 25-30 per cent manganese, 1-2 per cent nickel, 1-2 per cent copper, and 0.2-0.3 per cent cobalt by weight. The exact proportions vary, but the same four metals dominate every sample analysed since the first systematic surveys in the 1970s. The United States Geological Survey, in its most recent published assessment, estimates that the total contained metal in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone nodule field alone exceeds the combined cobalt and manganese in every known terrestrial reserve on Earth.
The metals matter because every battery in every electric vehicle currently being manufactured uses one or more of them. Cobalt is essential to current lithium-ion battery chemistry. Nickel sits at the cathode of the most energy-dense modern battery cells. Manganese is used in both batteries and steel alloys. Copper is the foundational conductor for nearly all electrical infrastructure. The wind turbines, the solar inverters, the transmission lines, the battery storage systems, and the electric vehicles that the global energy transition depends on all require these four metals in significant quantities.
The current land-based supply chains for these metals are concentrated in a small number of countries. Approximately 70 per cent of the world’s cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the human-rights record of the artisanal mining sector is one of the most documented industrial concerns of the twenty-first century. Approximately 60 per cent of the world’s nickel comes from Indonesia, where rainforest clearance for nickel mining has accelerated sharply since 2020. Approximately 90 per cent of cobalt and nickel refining capacity is in China.
The Clarion-Clipperton Zone nodules represent an alternative supply that would, by the calculations of the companies proposing to extract them, dilute that geographic concentration and reduce the human-rights cost of the supply chain.
The catch is that the alternative supply sits inside an ecosystem that science has barely begun to understand. To understand more, check out this short video on the subject.
What lives down there
A 2023 analysis published by the Natural History Museum in London, drawing on the most comprehensive biological survey of the region undertaken to date, identified approximately 5,578 animal species recorded from samples collected in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. Of those 5,578 species, only 436 had been formally named and described by science. The remaining 5,142 species were entirely new to taxonomy, and the survey’s authors estimated that the figure represents only a fraction of the total biodiversity actually present.
The figure of 90 per cent undescribed species is the conservative reading of the data.
A peer-reviewed analysis in Scientific Reports from May 2025 reported the discovery of two entirely new sea star species recovered from a single piece of sunken wood found in the zone, both within a group of organisms that had been studied for decades but never properly catalogued. A second analysis published in ZooKeys in March 2026 identified 24 new species of deep-sea crustaceans in the zone, including one entirely new superfamily called Mirabestiidae, a level of taxonomic novelty that is extremely rare in modern biology. The discovery of a new superfamily means that an entire branch of the evolutionary tree, distinct from all previously known life, has been documented for the first time.
What lives down there includes deep-sea sponges that grow on the surfaces of the nodules themselves and cannot survive without them. Ghost-white sea anemones drifting on the seabed currents. Translucent sea cucumbers that may be the most abundant macrofauna at the abyssal depths. Worms, brittle stars, amphipods, isopods, and an enormous range of microorganisms that scientists now suspect play important roles in the carbon cycling of the deep ocean. Many of these species have evolved over geological timescales in the specific physical conditions of the abyssal plain, including the presence of the nodules themselves, which provide the only hard substrate in an otherwise soft sediment environment.
The nodules, in other words, are not only the resource the mining industry wants to extract. They are also the physical foundation that a substantial fraction of the ecosystem depends on.
Why the race is happening now
The International Seabed Authority, established by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea in 1994, has spent the past thirty years developing the regulatory framework that governs mineral extraction in international waters. The authority has granted 31 exploration contracts to 22 contractors from 21 countries for prospecting and surveying activities in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. It has not, as of mid-2025, granted any commercial exploitation licences. The regulatory code that would permit commercial extraction is still being negotiated.
In June 2021, the Pacific island nation of Nauru, sponsoring the Canadian-headquartered company The Metals Company, formally notified the International Seabed Authority that it intended to apply for a commercial exploitation permit. This notification triggered a clause in the Law of the Sea treaty that gave the authority two years to finalise its mining code. The deadline expired in 2023 without a code being agreed.
On 24 April 2025, the United States issued an executive order authorising federal agencies to begin granting licences for deep-sea mineral extraction both within the US Exclusive Economic Zone and in international waters including the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, explicitly bypassing the International Seabed Authority’s regulatory process. The Metals Company submitted an application under the US framework within weeks. The International Seabed Authority has formally opposed the action. The legal status of any extraction conducted under the US framework, in territory the international authority claims jurisdiction over, is genuinely unsettled.
China has separately announced plans to conduct nodule-collection trials in its own Clarion-Clipperton Zone exploration areas in 2025. Beijing Pioneer, a Chinese state-affiliated contractor, has scheduled a test collection. China Minmetals received approval from the International Seabed Authority in May 2025 to proceed with its own mining trial. Several other contractors are in advanced testing phases.
The trial collections carried out so far have already lifted thousands of tonnes of nodules from the seafloor. In 2022, The Metals Company’s subsidiary Nauru Ocean Resources collected over 3,000 tonnes of nodules from the NORI-D test area, in what the company described as the first commercial-scale deep-sea mineral collection test in history. The collected nodules were processed at a Pacific Metals facility in Hachinohe, Japan, into a material called calcine, from which nickel, copper, cobalt, manganese, and iron can subsequently be refined.
What previous disturbance experiments have shown
In 1989, a German research team conducted a controlled disturbance experiment called DISCOL in the Peru Basin, approximately 1,000 kilometres south of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, in which an 8-metre-wide plough harrow was towed 78 times through an 11-square-kilometre area of abyssal seafloor at approximately 4,150 metres depth. The experiment was designed to simulate, on a small scale, the kind of physical disturbance that commercial nodule mining would produce. The site was then revisited periodically over the following decades.
The most recent comprehensive survey of the DISCOL site, published by Daniel Jones and colleagues in Scientific Reports in 2019, found that 26 years after the experimental disturbance, the megafauna of the disturbed area had still not recovered. Suspension-feeding animals, which depend on the surfaces of the original nodules to anchor themselves, remained significantly reduced in the ploughed tracks. Mobile scavengers had partly returned. The plough marks themselves remained visible on the seafloor, essentially unchanged by 26 years of natural sediment redistribution.
A companion study published in Science Advances in 2020 examined the microbial communities at the same DISCOL site and found that even after 26 years, the microbial populations within the plough tracks had only partially recovered and that full recovery, on the team’s projected trajectory, may take approximately 50 years from the time of the original disturbance.
The DISCOL site is, by current count, the most comprehensive long-term observation of how the deep-sea abyssal ecosystem responds to physical disturbance. The early results suggest that the recovery timescales of the abyssal ecosystem are not measured in years but in decades.
What the international community is doing
As the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace set out in a 2023 analysis, the political opposition to commercial deep-sea mining has been led by the Pacific Island states whose Exclusive Economic Zones and ocean-dependent economies sit closest to the proposed mining areas. As of 2025, at least 32 countries have called for a moratorium or a precautionary pause on commercial deep-sea mining until the scientific understanding of the affected ecosystems is more complete. The list of countries calling for a pause now includes France, Germany, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Fiji, the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau, Samoa, Vanuatu, and Tuvalu. Additional countries have called for a delay.
The position of the moratorium movement is, in summary, that the science of the deep-sea ecosystems being targeted is too incomplete to support a rational risk-benefit decision about commercial extraction. The position of the industry, in summary, is that the metals contained in the nodules are essential to the global energy transition, that terrestrial extraction of the same metals causes documented human and environmental harms that deep-sea extraction would avoid, and that the regulatory delay is producing the worst possible outcome by allowing unregulated trial collections to continue while the formal framework is debated.
The International Seabed Authority’s council met in Kingston, Jamaica in July 2025 to continue work on the mining code. The session ended without a final agreement.
What is at stake
The Clarion-Clipperton Zone is one of the largest single biological systems on Earth that has been almost entirely unstudied. It is also one of the largest single mineral resources on Earth that has been almost entirely unextracted. The intersection of those two facts is the question the next decade will resolve.
The nodules took millions of years to form. The species that depend on them have evolved over similar timescales. The infrastructure required to extract them has been built in the last fifteen years. The regulatory framework required to govern the extraction has not yet been agreed.
The trial collections continuing now, on the seafloor of an ecosystem where every research expedition still discovers entire new branches of life, are testing what happens when humans disturb something they have not yet finished documenting.
What that disturbance does to the system that has produced the metals the energy transition depends on is, on the strongest current reading of the available evidence, not yet known.
