Join news editor Colin Schultz and expert guests on December 9, 2021, at 11:30 a.m. Pacific Time, for a discussion about the potential and pitfalls of deep-sea mining.
“See this?” Paul Lynch, an affable middle-aged lawyer, asks the schoolkids gathered around him. He holds up a baseball-sized rock—a polymetallic nodule, so called because it contains multiple metals, among them cobalt, copper, manganese, nickel, and rare earth elements. The nodule formed about five kilometers below the surface of the sea, where the pressure is intense enough to crack steel. This nodule, and others like it, grew as dissolved metals in the seawater arranged themselves around a nucleus at a rate of one to 10 millimeters per million years.
“This is our oil,” Lynch says. His eyebrows are raised, excited. “This is gonna make us rich. Like how oil made Saudi Arabia rich.”
It’s late 2019, and I’m watching him pitch this dream at a career expo on Rarotonga, the most developed of the Cook Islands, a South Pacific nation of 15 tiny islands and about 17,000 people in an ocean the size of Mexico. Here, at the epicenter of the hospitality industry that propels the country’s economy, there aren’t any stoplights, roosters strut around in restaurants, and the internet stops working when it rains.
Lynch is representing the Seabed Minerals Authority (SBMA), an agency of the Cook Islands government, at the expo. The logo on his navy-blue polo resembles a map of the Cook Islands, except without islands. There...
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