The Race to Send Robots to Mine the Ocean Floor

When the 300-foot Maersk Launcher docked in San Diego early Monday morning, it unloaded a cargo of hardened black blobs scooped from the bottom of the sea. DeepGreen But leaders of Canada-based mining company DeepGreen Metals and its subsidiary NORI think they have figured out how to harvest the nodules without wrecking the deep ocean habitat—and make a profit at the same time. “Nature created this abundant resource filled with all the metals we need for our future,” says Deep Green CEO Gerard Barron, a former advertising technology entrepreneur from Australia who says he has plowed $8 million of his own money into the undersea mining enterprise. Everything you need to build an EV battery is contained in our nodules.” A team of more than 70 DeepGreen technicians, researchers, and scientists just completed a seven-week voyage aboard the Maersk Launcher to the Clarion Clipperton Zone, a 1.7 million square mile hunk of the Pacific between Hawaii and Mexico where much of the world’s supply of these nodules exist. That includes the infamous Glomar Explorer that turned out to be a clandestine effort by the CIA to recover a sunken Soviet submarine “We are relying on decades of policy development and years of research to characterize the seafloor and build models of the deep sea so we understand how the currents flow, what animals live there, and what changes there will be,” Stone says.