More than 13,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, a more-than-70-ton machine trundled like a tank on its caterpillar tracks for a tenth of a mile—sucking up potato-sized nodules of rock packed with copper, manganese, cobalt, and nickel. It was 2022, and that pilot run of a subsea harvester by a Canadian business, The Metals Company, was pronounced a success.
The company is working to get a green light to deploy similar machines for commercial harvesting over an area of 65,000 square kilometers, to extract over 600 million metric tons of nodules.
There are riches on the ocean floor—round deposits made up of tightly packed layers of critical minerals that have long been out of reach. But not anymore. The pursuits of The Metals Company are among 31 initiatives by companies, governments and state-owned enterprises—including China, India, and the Republic of Nauru, a tiny island nation in the southwestern Pacific Ocean—to collect nodules for analysis and to test mining equipment.
