Four thousand meters down, there is no sunlight. There is barely sound, just the slow settle of sediment and the occasional bioluminescent flicker. Nobody has agreed on what happens to that darkness. This week, in a conference room in Kingston, Jamaica, they are trying.
The International Seabed Authority’s Council opened its session on July 13 and runs through the 24th, followed by the Assembly from the 27th through the 31st. On the agenda: the draft regulations for exploitation of mineral resources in the Area. Regulations that, after years of negotiation, still don’t exist.
Ironically, Nauru is moving anyway. Its sponsored contractor, NORI, is preparing to submit a full exploitation application before the Council even finishes debating the rules that would govern it. NORI’s exploration contract is set to expire on July 21. A breach investigation into its earlier operations is due to be reported at this same session. So the timeline reads like this: no code, a pending breach finding, and an application to mine anyway.
I don’t think that’s how you write law for the last wild place on Earth.
Meanwhile the United States, unwilling to wait on an international process it hasn’t ratified, issued its own final rule in January, opening a domestic path to deep-sea mining permits framed as a matter of national security. Days ago, Deep Sea Minerals Corp partnered with an autonomous underwater robotics company to move test mining forward. The race has a shape now. Critical minerals, defense contracts, urgency dressed up as inevitability.
And yet in that very same January, something else happened. The High Seas Treaty entered into force, covering roughly sixty percent of the ocean and, for the first time, giving nations a legal framework to protect biodiversity in waters that belong to no one and everyone. Two tracks. Protection and extraction, moving at the same time, in the same year, over the same water.
I keep thinking about the sediment down there. It took centuries to settle into that stillness. A single mining pass can lift a plume that doesn’t resettle for years, smothering whatever lives in that dark long enough to have never seen daylight and never needed to.
Kingston will decide a great deal in the next two weeks, or it will decide nothing, which is its own kind of decision. Either way, the seafloor won’t know it’s being discussed. It will just keep doing what it has always done, indifferent to our deadlines, in a darkness older than any of the men in that room.
That’s the part I keep coming back to.
