In 1983, the Verena Tunnicliffe was floating about 250 kilometers off the coast of Vancouver Island when a radio call came in – geologists on a nearby sister ship had sunk something strange from the sea floor.
“We’ve got all these weird smelly worms,” ​​Tunnicliffe remembers being told. “Would you like them?” The deep-sea explorer was the only one with a submarine, and a year later, her exploration team had raised enough money to return.
When the Tunnicliffe finally descended more than 2,000 meters to a patch of ocean floor, all was dark except for the light on the submarine. Beneath them, two tectonic plates were diverging, allowing cold seawater to seep through the Earth’s crust. Superheated by molten lava, the water spews back into the ocean as a 400 degree Celsius hot soup of nutrients and chemicals. The crew crawled to the bottom in an exercise Tunnicliffe describes as “trying to explore the Rockies with a flashlight.” First came the white carpets of bacteria. Then, out of the darkness, huge piles of “beautiful” white tube worms emerged, the six-foot-long creatures with red plumes. Inside, the scientist would later learn that they had no intestines, but a body filled with bacteria fed by air passages that feed the worms. And in a possible window into the origins of life on a hot, young Earth, a bacterium found in the airways of B.C. it was later discovered to survive temperatures of 121 C – the hottest upper limit of life. “Once covered, it’s dripping with animals,” Tunnicliffe said, pointing to at least 12 different species found there that haven’t been seen anywhere else on Earth. A year later, Tunnicliffe would find vents on a massive scale, hydrothermal vents forming chimneys up to 45 meters high, known as “black smokers”.
In the decades that followed, over 800 extinct and active chimneys would be discovered. The deep-sea scientist would have 10 undersea creatures named after her and be awarded the Order of Canada for her pioneering work.
Soaring as high as buildings, their underwater vents and chimneys can often contain ores of gold, copper and silver ore – making them an attractive potential source of wealth if someone could figure out how to mine them. A huge variety of life gathers around the ‘black smokers’, which spew water superheated to 380 degrees Celsius and are part of the Endeavor Hot Vents, the first such protected sites in the world. – Photo by Verena Tunnicliffe By 2003, the Endeavor hydrothermal vents would be the first marine protected area in Canada and the first “hot holes” protected from human exploitation in the world.
But in other parts of the deep ocean, a battle that had been quietly raging for decades was about to enter a new phase of rising tensions, raising the prospect of a fight for some of the ocean’s deepest known riches. At the center of the controversy is The Metals Company, a Vancouver-based mining company trying to harvest the minerals needed to wean the world off fossil fuels and onto a more sustainable path. The US Geological Survey found this year that deep-ocean mining could meet up to 45 percent of all the world’s critical metal needs by 2065. But for scientists like Tunnicliffe, a race to the bottom of one of the planet’s least-explored kingdoms carries huge risks, both for its poorly understood ecosystems and for their connection to an oceanic carbon pump believed to be cleaning up 30 percent of man-made greenhouse. gas emissions from the atmosphere each year. “We’re talking about a group of organisms that have changed the way we understand life on this planet, right down to the origin of life, how life works in extremely extreme environments where we never thought life could live,” he said. Tunnicliffe. “It has fueled our search for life on other planets.”

Three pots of deep sea treasure and a Russian submarine

The first sign that the ocean floor could contain minerals useful to mankind dates back more than 150 years to the HMS Challenger expedition, a voyage that many now consider the foundation of modern oceanography.
The mission would be the first to explore the Mariana Trench with bathymetric soundings and verify the existence of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the world’s largest mountain range and the dividing line where two crustal plates diverge, extending the Atlantic sea floor. But it was on March 7, 1873, when the expedition’s crew dredged to the deck “several curious black oval bodies composed of almost pure oxide of manganese” that mankind got its first glimpse of what wealth lay deep out of sight. Metal masses start with a core – a sunken shark tooth, tiny fossil or piece of basalt rock. Over tens of millions of years, minerals are precipitated from the surrounding seawater, forming one metallic layer after another. Often growing to the size of a potato, the nodules are rich in nickel, copper, cobalt and manganese – all minerals highly sought after by battery makers and other technology makers.
You drop 4,000 meters below parts of the Pacific Ocean, and they can be found scattered across the surface of abyssal plains, flat sections of relatively unexplored ocean that cover about half of Earth’s surface. But like the precious metals found near some hydrothermal vents, in the past, it was either too expensive or the technology didn’t exist to pull the nodules up from deep. A polymetallic nodule is captured on a mountain deep in the North Atlantic Ocean during the 2021 North Atlantic Stepping Stones mission. US Geological Survey and NOAA Ocean Exploration It would take more than 90 years before the idea of ​​mining for metal nodules again caught the public’s attention.
In 1965, mining engineer John L. Mero published the influential book The Mineral Resources of the Sea, sparking interest in nodules at a time when they were thought to be an infinite resource that was developing faster than it could be harvested.
A year later, Malta’s ambassador to the United Nations, Arvid Pardo, made an impassioned appeal to the General Assembly calling on coastal states to end the expansion of exclusive economic zones and regulate the ocean floor, not just for “those who have the required technology’, but ‘in the interest of humanity’. “That’s where the idea came from that what we discover there really belongs to everyone and should also be promoted for future generations,” Tunnicliffe said. The question revolved around the idea that the riches of the oceans should not belong only to the richest nations with the resources to exploit the seabed. This began a decades-long legal process to regulate mining in international waters. But the pendulum would continue to swing and in the early 1970s, a commodity boom further drove interest in deep-sea mining. So when eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes announced he was building a giant ship to mine the ocean abyss, the story made sense. For the public, the mission would be the first attempt to mine deep-sea metallic nodules. In fact, it was an elaborate ruse. In 1968, US authorities learned that the Soviet submarine K-129 had sunk in over 5,000 meters of water, about 2,500 kilometers northwest of Hawaii.
Working with Hughes and his new ship the Glomar Explorer, the US Central Intelligence Agency planned to recover the submarine and its nuclear warhead torpedoes. In 1975, reporting by the Los Angeles Times and later the New York Times would reveal the outline of what some have described as “the most daring covert operation in history.” Project Azorian was one of the most expensive covert operations in CIA history, involving the Howard Hughes-built Glomar Explorer recovery ship (above) and the Soviet submarine K-129, pictured below circa 1968. – Photos by the US government. C.I.A The story has changed over the years, with some suggesting that most of the sub was recovered, others stating that it broke up as it was pulled from the depths in the ship’s pool. Whatever the case, the extraordinary stories that emerged from what was declassified as Project Azorian in 2010 also helped shape the reckoning of who should have access to the deep—specifically, the wealth that sits on its abysmal floor. .
Half a dozen competing international consortia would pilot deep-water mining in the late 1970s. But in the early 1980s, commodity prices fell and that work was shelved as companies cut their exploration budgets. As the German historian Ole Sparenberg put it, deep-sea mining was essentially “dead in the water.” Environmental and equity concerns for less affluent nations eventually led the United Nations to establish the International Seabed Authority — also known as ISA or “the Enterprise” — in 1982 under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea ( UNCLOS). and to ratify its existence in a 1994 implementing agreement.
Today, the Jamaica-based organization consists of 167 member states and the European Commission. Custodian of the deep sea as a “common heritage for mankind”, the ISA’s dual mandate is to facilitate the extraction of mineral resources from the seabed while protecting the deep sea environment.
The prevailing sentiment at the time was that onshore mining was much more profitable, “and how are you going to do that anyway?” said Tunnicliffe. Even if the technology and funding existed to pull the metals from the deep, there were no regulations to allow mining in international waters. That is until an ambitious company from Vancouver, BC, sparked a countdown that…