The $20 trillion fight over who controls the seabed

Honolulu, HAWAII — Solomon Kahoʻohalahala steadied himself on the double-hulled voyaging canoe called Hōkūleʻa as a 15-foot swell rose and the vessel took off under the midday sun. He had been paddling since dawn along the south shore of Molokaʻi, and his arms were tired. As the canoe reached the notoriously gusty channel between Molokaʻi and Oʻahu, the crew unfurled her sails. Suddenly Hōkūleʻa was racing, surfing waves that rose so high they blocked the view of Diamond Head Crater, a high volcanic cone on Oʻahu. 

It was the summer of 1975, and Kahoʻohalahala was a 24-year-old Native Hawaiian man from the island of Lanaʻi who had grown up speaking English, learning about American history, and knowing little about his Indigenous language, culture, or political history. He was just learning about how Pacific peoples had navigated the ocean, guided by constellations, to find their islands. Hōkūleʻa was the first double-hulled voyaging canoe he had seen, a vessel built by Hawaiians eager to reconnect with knowledge that had been taken from them.

“This is how we got here,” Kahoʻohalahala thought as he gripped the rails of Hōkūleʻa that day and looked up at the sails. “I am part of these islands because I came on a canoe.”

As he inhaled the salty air and felt the immensity of the ocean stretching out around him, Kahoʻohalahala realized what it meant not just to be Hawaiian, but to be Indigenous to the Pacific, peoples whose lives and genealogies owe everything to the sea.

“That was a defining moment for me,” said Kahoʻohalahala, now 73. 

Today, the ocean that Kahoʻohalahala and so many other Indigenous peoples crossed, cared for, and survived on, is on track to be mined for polymetallic nodules — potato-sized nodes that contain critical minerals necessary to power cell phones, electric vehicles, renewable energy, and weapons. The nodules are full of cobalt, nickel, copper, and other minerals and were formed millimeter by millimeter over millions of years. Some are tens of millions of years old. The process to collect those nodules, called deep-sea mining, has been described as “a $20 trillion opportunity. More than 500,000 square miles of ocean globally has been approved for mining — an area nearly twice the size of Texas — although only a fraction of that area actually has mineral deposits.

Mining for polymetallic nodules will require lowering massive tractors the size of houses more than two miles down to the seafloor where the vast majority of species are unknown and have yet to be named by humans.

There, the machines will scrape the seabed, dredging up both sediment and nodules, carrying the latter up to the surface while releasing plumes of silt into the sea. Animals that aren't crushed when the machines suck them up will likely be killed by the changing temperatures and atmospheric pressure that their bodies aren't designed to exist in. Lifting the nodules to the surface could create sediment plumes that plunge downward, blanketing and smothering corals, sponges, and other animals that can’t escape. Depending on the depth where the plumes are released, their metallic contents might get absorbed by tuna fish and other sea creatures, contaminating essential food sources.

“There’s going to be damage at a very large scale,” said Jeffrey Drazen, an oceanographer at the University of Hawaiʻi who has received funding from a deep-sea mining company to research the environmental impacts of the practice. “It’s a matter of how much.” 

The United Nations body in charge of overseeing mineral extraction from the international seafloor, known as the International Seabed Authority, or ISA, is in the midst of a years-long process of finalizing regulations to allow countries and companies to excavate the deep sea. If passed, the rules could allow groups to tear the crusts off undersea mountains, rip nodules from the seafloor, and cut into chimney-like hydrothermal vents in the deepest, darkest parts of the ocean.

Beyond the environmental harms, there are concerns that the process will violate the rights of Indigenous peoples who hold complex views and beliefs about the ocean, and depend on it for their cultural, spiritual, and physical well-being and survival.

The current international rules that govern the high seas and allow countries to claim sections of them for mining date back to the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, a treaty that manages what happens in areas of oceans deemed outside of national jurisdictions.

“The law of the sea basically colonized [Pacific peoples’] ocean,” said Frank Murphy, a resident of French Polynesia who, along with his wife Teurumereariki Hinano Murphy, has advocated with Kahoʻohalahala against seabed mining. “The law of the sea allowed the global community to say we have rights over this ocean, including these high seas.”

Teurumereariki Hinano Murphy said visiting the headquarters of the International Seabed Authority in Jamaica made her realize how little control Pacific peoples have over what happens in their ocean.

“I realized that the future of our ocean is decided there,” she said, “far away from our people and our community, and without us being aware of … what these nations are deciding for their benefit.” 

Fifty years after his life-changing canoe voyage, Kahoʻohalahala is leading a group of Indigenous advocates, including the Murphys, to save the ocean from deep-sea mining.

They are pushing the ISA to ensure that the regulations it finalizes explicitly state that any mining venture must obtain the free, prior, and informed consent of Indigenous peoples ahead of commencing any commercial operations. It’s among several proposals that he and other advocates are fighting for, including ensuring that Indigenous peoples — whose territories are made up of far more water than land — are permitted full participation in discussions and decisions about deep-sea mining.

And the clock is ticking.

The ISA has been working on seabed mining regulations since 2014, and in 2021, the country of Nauru formally requested that the ISA adopt regulations to govern seabed mining by triggering a treaty provision, which sets a two-year deadline for the authority to do so. If it doesn't, Nauru's plan to mine in the Clarion Kipperton Zone, nodule-rich international waters south of Hawaiʻi, will be “provisionally approved”.

The regulations haven’t been finalized, and Nauru hasn’t moved ahead yet with mining, but an application could be submitted as soon as this year. Norway’s Parliament last year voted to open an area of its seabed for mining licenses before ditching the plan after heavy criticism, but countries are still snapping up exploratory licenses from the ISA to mine in international waters — with China in the lead. Meanwhile, the vacuum of knowledge about the seafloor has prompted hundreds of scientists and dozens of countries to call for a moratorium on deep-sea mining until its potential environmental effects are better understood, including how the practice will impact fisheries that overlap with the underwater sites.

In the Pacific, Nauru isn’t the only country eyeing the new industry. Although many like Fiji and Palau have called for a moratorium on mining, in Tonga and the Cook Islands, Indigenous peoples are wrestling with the pressure to develop their economies and how doing so could irrevocably change their island homes that are already stressed by the effects of climate change. 

“We're experiencing this because we have already created an imbalance in our ecosystems, in our Earth, and now we are feeling the consequences of that,” Kahoʻohalahala said. “Do we continue to just move in that vein of continuous colonization, continuous extraction?”

The Kumulipo is the Hawaiian chant that describes the creation of the world: “At the time that turned the heat of the Earth, at the time when the heavens turned and changed, at the time when the light of the sun was subdued, to cause light to break forth.”

The song describes the ocean as the source of all living things, starting with sea creatures in the darkness and ending with an extensive Hawaiian genealogy connecting the people to the sea.

“We're ocean people,” Kahoʻohalahala said. “We are related to the ocean because we are the seafarers and we came by way of canoe to inhabit the largest ocean on earth.” 

Other Pacific peoples have similar creation stories, and the sacredness of the ocean isn't limited to the birth of life, it also has a major role in death: “That’s where the soul of our ancestors, when they leave this world, they go into the deep,” said Teurumereariki Hinano Murphy from French Polynesia, an advocate alongside Kahoʻohalahala at the International Seabed Authority. Cecilio Raiukiulipiy, a traditional navigator from the Federated States of Micronesia, said until the 1970s, when Western influence changed burial practices, all of his relatives were laid to rest at sea. “Deep-sea mining, that's like you're digging up the grave of my ancestors,” he said. 

Yet despite this cultural tie to the ocean, some Pacific countries like Nauru and the Cook Islands are at the forefront of exploring the potential of deep-sea mining. 

“The greatest risk we face is not the potential environmental impacts of mineral recovery, but the risk of inaction,” Nauru’s president David Adeang said at the U.N. General Assembly last fall. “There is a risk of failing to seize the opportunity to transform to renewable energy and decarbonize our planet.” 

In the Cook Islands, Prime Minister Mark Brown, who is Māori, has described the pursuit of seabed mining within the islands’ surrounding waters as part of the country’s “journey of sovereign independence,” and compared it to how Cook Islanders first navigated across the ocean using their knowledge of constellations and waves to find and settle islands like Rarotonga. 

 “We discovered the islands hundreds of years ago that today we call home. We had a capability that nobody else had,” he told a television reporter last year. “Today we choose now to take a journey that's not across our ocean, but down into the deep ocean.”

Brown just signed a new agreement with China in February regarding seabed minerals, with details yet to be released. But he has promised that mining won’t proceed if it’s environmentally harmful. “If the extraction method is going to damage the ocean, then we’re not going to go ahead with it,” he said. 

Drazen, the oceanographer from the University of Hawaiʻi, said some degree of environmental harm is guaranteed — the question is just how much. At the bottom of the sea, the ground has barely been disrupted for millions of years, and populations of sea creatures could take decades to recover. Heavy equipment is expected to hit and kill sea creatures upon impact. Among other ecological impacts of deep-sea mining, Drazen has studied how the plumes of sediment that mining is expected to generate could affect sea life closer to the surface, and suggested that mining companies consider releasing the plumes at lower depths to minimize impacts on fisheries. 

And while Brown refers to seabed mining as “harvesting,” a commonly used descriptor by proponents of the practice, Drazen doesn’t think that term is accurate. Harvesting implies that nodules are a renewable resource, which they aren’t, he said.

Kahoʻohalahala thinks the reality is no Pacific nation is truly independent of one another: Any decision the Cook Islands makes, that Tonga makes, will affect the same ocean that also belongs to Hawaiʻi, to Guam, to Fiji, to Papua New Guinea, and beyond.

“Drawing circles around our islands to identify where our authority is doesn't fit with the way we manage our places. There are no such divisions in the ocean that separate our responsibility,” Kahoʻohalahala said. “The ocean knows no barriers. Our resources move across the entirety of the ocean.”

(This story will be continued in Part 2, later this week.)

Editor’s Note: In an article published by Pacific Island Times, May 5, 2023, “Deepsea mining eyed in American Samoa”, a license application was filed by the American Samoa Economic Development Council (ASEDC) with the International Seabed Authority to be heard in July 2023. The article noted that American Samoa was sitting on a gold mine, and being “eyed as a potential supplier of much-sought-after minerals, promising to generate hi-tech jobs and supplement the territory’s fishing economy.”

The article reports that “citing U.S. Geological Survey research, John Wasko, executive director of ASEDC, estimated 10 billion tons of subsea electric vehicle critical minerals lying on the ocean floor within American Samoa's exclusive economic zone.”

Wasko is a long-time American Samoa resident and entrepreneur. ASEDC is a nonprofit organization that explores business opportunities for the territory.

In November of 2022, ASEDC entered into a memorandum of understanding with the California-based Impossible Metals Inc. to collaborate on deep-sea mining of polymetallic nodules from American Samoa’s waters and process them into battery-grade metals, the article reports.

In July 2024, islandsbusiness.com reported that with an Executive Order, American Samoa’s then Governor Lemanu Peleti Mauga placed a moratorium on seabed mining in the waters of American Samoa. It applies to mining, extracting, or removal of minerals.

Lemanu’s Executive Order adds “that during this moratorium, American Samoa will advocate for the advancement of marine research, the development of sustainable ocean policies, and the promotion of local and international cooperation in the sustainable management of marine resources.”