92% of the species where seabed mining would start have no name yet

The deep ocean, once imagined as a silent, barren abyss, is in fact a world of staggering biodiversity and intricate, slow-motion processes. It is a realm where life thrives under immense pressure and in perpetual darkness, featuring species uniquely adapted to their extreme environment, many of which remain entirely unknown to science. This vast, unexplored frontier is now on the verge of becoming a new industrial landscape, targeted for the extraction of minerals vital to the global economy.

The intensifying demand for critical metals — cobalt, nickel, copper, and rare earth elements — is driving the push into these depths. These materials are essential components in renewable energy technologies, electric vehicle batteries, and consumer electronics, fueling a global race to secure supply chains. On the deep seabed, these minerals are found in various forms: polymetallic nodules scattered across abyssal plains, cobalt-rich crusts on seamounts, and polymetallic sulfides around hydrothermal vents. The prospect of accessing these vast reserves offers a tantalizing solution to terrestrial resource scarcity.

Yet, our understanding of these deep-sea ecosystems lags far behind the technological capacity to exploit them. Scientists often note that we know more about the surface of Mars than we do about the abyssal plains and hydrothermal vent communities that deep-sea mining operations would directly impact. The organisms living in these environments are often extremely long-lived, grow slowly, and reproduce infrequently, making them particularly vulnerable to disturbance and slow to recover, if they can recover at all. This scientific blind spot means we are making decisions about a system whose functions and interdependencies we cannot fully grasp.

The gap is measurable. A 2023 checklist of life recorded in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, published in Current Biology, counted roughly 5,600 species — and found that about 92 percent of them were new to science, with no name and no published description. The International Seabed Authority, meanwhile, lists 32 exploration contracts in force, 17 of them inside that same zone. The licensing has run ahead of the naming.

The proposed mining methods involve massive remotely operated vehicles scraping or vacuuming the seabed, collecting nodules or crushing and pumping crusts and sulfides to surface vessels. These operations would not only physically obliterate unique habitats but also generate vast plumes of sediment that could drift for hundreds or thousands of kilometers, smothering filter feeders and impacting light penetration in the water column. Noise pollution from mining machinery and surface vessels could disrupt deep-sea fauna, many of which rely on sound for navigation, communication, and predation.

At the heart of the governance challenge is the International Seabed Authority (ISA), a UN-mandated body responsible for regulating mineral-related activities in the international seabed area, which lies beyond national jurisdictions. For decades, the ISA has been developing a mining code. However, a "two-year rule," triggered in 2021 by Nauru, means that the ISA is now under pressure to finalize regulations that would allow commercial deep-sea mining to proceed, even if comprehensive environmental protections are not yet fully established. This timeline accelerates the potential for extraction before the science is fully understood.

This situation presents a critical paradox: humanity is poised to make irreversible decisions about an ocean system whose intricacies and value we are only just beginning to uncover. The data gaps are immense; most baseline environmental data has been collected at the surface, in specific regions, by a handful of countries, leaving vast stretches of the deep ocean, particularly the open ocean far from shore, virtually unmonitored. Reporting on deep-sea mining therefore requires a simultaneous examination of both the scientific unknowns and the rapidly evolving governance landscape, asking not just what we stand to gain, but what we risk losing before we even understand its full scope.