For more than a decade the International Seabed Authority has been writing the rulebook that would let anyone mine the deep ocean floor. It still has not finished. When the ISA's member states met in Kingston this March, they left again with no mining code, no agreed deadline, and a widening split between the roughly forty nations calling for a moratorium and the few pressing to begin.
Into that vacuum stepped a single company. The Metals Company, a Canadian firm, gave up waiting for the international system and applied instead to the United States — which never ratified the Law of the Sea and claims no obligation to the ISA — for permits to mine a stretch of the Pacific's Clarion-Clipperton Zone. In March a US agency judged the application "substantially compliant"; the company expects a permit by early 2027. It would be the first commercial mining of the international seabed in history, done entirely outside the body created to govern it.
The stakes are a principle as much as a place. Under the Law of the Sea the deep seabed is the "common heritage of mankind" — its wealth meant to be shared with all states, coastal or landlocked, and mined only under collective rules. France's ocean minister called the US-backed plan "environmental piracy"; the ISA's secretary-general warned that unilateral extraction would breach international law. Whether that principle holds may turn on the coming weeks: the company's key exploration contracts, sponsored by Nauru and Tonga, come up for renewal at the ISA this July, and members are weighing whether to investigate — or terminate — them.
The thing being fought over is barely understood. The nodules are potato-sized rocks of nickel, cobalt, copper and manganese, resting on an abyssal plain that took millions of years to form and that science has scarcely mapped. The industry's case is that those metals are needed for batteries and that seabed mining is gentler than mining on land. Its opponents point to the sediment plume, the noise, and the fact that the abyss, if it recovers at all, recovers over geological time. What is not in dispute is that the decision is being made now, at speed, and mostly out of sight — a commons enclosed before it was ever charted.
Sources
The stalemate: Oceanographic Magazine on the ISA council ending without a mining code; Seas At Risk on the missing deadline and the growing moratorium bloc. The end-run to Washington: The Conversation on mining outside the UN framework; Mining.com on the January 2026 US rule fast-tracking permits; the US Congressional Research Service on the legal issues. The contracts and the July deadline: EJIL:Talk! on the Nauru- and Tonga-sponsored contracts expiring in 2026; Greenpeace International on the alleged breaches and the case for non-renewal.
Further Reading
The case for mining: A&O Shearman's 2026 briefing on seabed minerals, critical-mineral security and the investment case — the industry's own framing. What's actually down there: Smithsonian on a Pacific mining test that measurably cut biodiversity and animal populations — evidence, not just warning. The law of the commons: EJIL:Talk! on how the Authority could force contractors to choose between the ISA and the USA.