For about a week, delegates from 168 member states pour into Kingston from around the world, gathering at a broad semicircle of desks in the auditorium of the Jamaica Conference Centre. It is classified as “autonomous” and falls under the direction of its own secretary general, who convenes his own general assembly once a year, at the ISA headquarters. Unlike most UN bodies, the ISA receives little oversight. The United Nations has given that task to an obscure organization known as the International Seabed Authority, which is housed in a pair of drab gray office buildings at the edge of Kingston Harbour, in Jamaica. Regulations for ocean mining have never been formally established.

But the biggest prize for mining companies will be access to international waters, which cover more than half of the global seafloor and contain more valuable minerals than all the continents combined.Ĭheck out more from this issue and find your next story to read. Another company, Nautilus Minerals, is working in the territorial waters of Papua New Guinea to shatter a field of underwater hot springs lined with precious metals, while Japan and South Korea have embarked on national projects to exploit their own offshore deposits. In 2018, those ships extracted 1.4 million carats from the coastal waters of Namibia in 2019, De Beers commissioned a new ship that will scrape the bottom twice as quickly as any other vessel. On the west coast of Africa, the De Beers Group is using a fleet of specialized ships to drag machinery across the seabed in search of diamonds.

Today, many of the largest mineral corporations in the world have launched underwater mining programs. For more than a century, oceanographers continued to identify new minerals on the seafloor-copper, nickel, silver, platinum, gold, and even gemstones-while mining companies searched for a practical way to dig them up. Five years later, another ship found similar nuggets at the bottom of the Atlantic, and two years after that, it discovered a field of the same objects in the Pacific. Scientists have documented their deposits since at least 1868, when a dredging ship pulled a chunk of iron ore from the seabed north of Russia. These peaks and valleys are laced with most of the same minerals found on land. To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.

De beers mining dredge