Miners Are Pulling Valuable Metals from the Seafloor, and Almost No One Knows about It
The owners of a controversial mining license have begun extracting valuable metals from the ocean floor
In hindsight, I am still not sure why the operators of the Danish-flagged MV Coco allowed me onboard. By the time I arrived last June, the vessel had been sailing for several weeks in the Bismarck Sea, a part of Papua New Guinea’s territorial waters, digging chunks of metal-rich deposits out of the ocean floor with a 12-ton hydraulic claw. The crew was testing the feasibility of mining seafloor deposits full of copper and some gold. It was probably the closest thing in the world to an operational deep-sea mining site. And the more I learned about the endeavor, the more surprised I became about the project’s very existence.On that summer morning, I arrived on a red catamaran after rolling over six-foot swells in the South Pacific for two hours, and I clambered up a metal ladder hanging down on the Coco’s starboard side. The 270-foot, 4,000-ton vessel towers at its prow, its vast aft deck full of cranes, winches and a remotely operated submersible. I was there at the invitation of Richard Parkinson, who founded Magellan, a company that specializes in deep-sea operations. At the top of the ladder, two crew members hauled me onboard the ship, which was roughly 20 miles from the closest shore, and a British manager for Magellan named James Holt greeted me, his smile sun-creased from more than two decades at sea. After a safety briefing, he ushered me through a heavy door into a dark, windowless shipping container on the rear deck that served as a control room.Inside the hushed cabin was a young Brazilian named Afhonso Perseguin, his face lit by screens displaying digital readings and colorful topographic charts. Gripping a joystick with his right hand, he delicately maneuvered a big, boxy remotely operated vehicle, or ROV, over a patch of seafloor a mile below. I watched on monitors as a robotic arm protruded from the ROV toward a monstrous set of clamshell jaws suspended from a cable that rose all the way up to the ship. Perseguin used the ROV’s arm to steer the jaws as a colleague beside him radioed instructions to a winch operator on deck.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Hydraulics drove the open clamshell into a gray chunk of flat seafloor ringed by rocky mounds and jagged slopes. The opposing teeth dug in, throwing up clouds of silt that filled the video feeds from the ROV. The robotic arm released, and the winch started hauling the jaws, clamped shut around their rocky cargo, on an hour-long journey up to the ship.Within minutes Perseguin reversed the ROV to survey the wider scene, revealing chimneys of rock looming up from the seafloor, pale yellow and gray in the submersible’s powerful lights. Small mollusk shells dotted their surface; a crab scuttled out of frame. “Quite amazing, really, isn’t it?” murmured John Matheson, a shaven-headed Scot supervising the ROV team. As Perseguin steered the ROV slowly around a column, the cameras suddenly captured a glassy plume of unmistakably warmer water spewing up from a hidden crevice.Hydraulics drove the monstrous clamshell jaws into a gray chunk of seafloor, throwing up clouds of silt that filled the video feeds from the remotely operated vehicle.That hydrothermal vent marked the edge of a tectonic plate in the Bismarck Sea. The metal-rich magma ejected over millennia from several such vents—some dormant, some still active like this one—was Magellan’s prize. The teams on the ship, hired by a company called Deep Sea Mining Finance (DSMF), were conducting bulk seafloor mining tests under a 2011 mining license issued by the Papua New Guinea (PNG) mining regulator. I was the only reporter onboard to witness the operation.Worldwide, oceanographers have found three distinct types of mineral deposits on the deep seafloor. Manganese crust is an inches-thick, metal-rich pavement that builds up over millions of years as dissolved metallic compounds in seawater gradually precipitate on certain seafloor regions. Polymetallic nodules are softball-size, metal-rich rocks strewn across enormous seafloor fields. And massive sulfide deposits, such as the ones being mined by the crew of the Coco, are big mounds and stacks of rock formed around hydrothermal vents. Over the past decade several companies have developed detailed but still hypothetical plans to profit from these deposits, hoping to help meet the world’s surging demand for the valuable metals necessary for batteries, electric cars, electronics, and many other products. Scientists have warned that these efforts risk destroying unique deep-sea habitats that we do not yet fully understand, and governments have been reluctant to grant exploration licenses in their territorial waters. But from what I saw during my two days and one night onboard the Coco, DSMF was digging in, and a new era of deep-sea mining had all but begun.Holt, one of Magellan’s offshore managers, said the aim was to test the physical requirements and environmental impacts of pulling up sulfide deposits. What would soon become unclear, however, was why the operators were stockpiling mounds of excavated rock on the seabed, and who in PNG knew the Coco was there.I was back outside on the rear deck as the sun dipped below the horizon when the cables finally brought the locked clamshell with its heavy contents to the sea surface. The giant yellow jaws emerged from the waves, gleaming under the ship’s floodlights. As they swung over the rear deck, water and small stones dripped from them; apparently the hydraulic system had failed to fully shut the contraption.A handful of us stood watching as it opened, dumping the load with a loud thud onto a massive metal weighing tray. The scales showed that some of the anticipated material was missing, presumably dropped during the mile-long journey to the surface. Crew members who had already completed dozens of similar lifts said this loss was an unusual occurrence. But the failure highlighted just one of the dangers of underwater mining: clouds of sediment leaked during these hauls to the surface or kicked up when the seafloor is ripped apart could suffocate sea creatures or unintentionally disperse harmful minerals.The Coco had been bringing up a jaw-load roughly every 12 hours. Just before this latest cache was swung onboard, an Australian marine scientist named Josh Young had been preparing to drop his testing equipment over the ship’s side. After each haul, he or his Papua New Guinean colleague Nicole Frani tried to measure the size and spread of the silt plume directly underneath the vessel. Using another winch, Young lowered a ring of long plastic cylinders known as Niskin tubes into the surf. Each sampling tube was set to open at a different depth as the ring passed down through the water column for several thousand feet. The scientists wanted to know how widely the cloud of silt “is spreading out and how it can affect the sea life below,” Frani explained.After less than an hour, Young hoisted the ring of tubes back up onto the deck. Peering over his shoulder, I watched an electronic screen reveal the water’s temperature, acidity, salinity, density, cloudiness and oxygen content, as well as its oxidizing capacity and conductivity—proxies for water cleanliness—at each depth.Like many offshore projects, the Coco operation was globalization incarnate. Frani and Young work for Erias, an Australian environmental consultancy that Magellan hired as a contractor for the summer’s endeavor. Magellan also hired the South African and British deckhands helping Young, plus the ROV team and a number of Malaysian hydrographic surveyors. Itself headquartered in Guernsey, an island between the U.K. and France, Magellan had chartered the Coco from a Danish firm, with sailors from the North Atlantic’s Faroe Islands and pursers from the Philippines. Much of the venture’s financing—for daily costs topping tens of thousands of dollars over several months—came from Russian and Omani investors, who had registered DSMF in the tax-friendly British Virgin Islands.Up on the ship’s bridge, Holt told me this enormously expensive exercise was to better understand the speed and power requirements of this mining technique, which relied on off-the-shelf commercial equipment Magellan had modified for underwater use. His remit was also to quantify the environmental impacts that a future vessel even larger than the 270-foot Coco might generate through similar extraction cycles. He told me that before the excursion had started he had been “totally in two minds” about seafloor mining. “But now I’ve seen how rich the deposit is and how little we’ve been disturbing the seabed,” he said. “We haven’t got huge clouds of sediment that are drifting off down in the current, smothering coral reefs, or all this sort of stuff that people are worried about.”I observed the same 12-hour extraction cycle twice during my time onboard. Holt told me that over nearly two months Magellan’s teams were focusing on four separate locations in a wider area collectively designated Solwara 1. In each location, the crew would excavate a number of square plots 33 feet on edge and up to 23 feet deep. He said PNG’s Mineral Resources Authority, or MRA, had approved the extraction of about 200 tons of material—from an ore body estimated at more than two million tons—for removal and further testing on shore. He also explained that to maximize the clamshell jaws’ productivity on the seafloor between each long descent and ascent, Magellan had decided to stockpile more material than the 200 tons permitted for testing—up to 600 tons from each of the four sites—perhaps for collection at a later date. I realized this meant Magellan and DSMF might be digging up more of the seabed than the regulator had anticipated.As with any mining endeavor, Solwara 1’s long-term economic viability would live and die on global metal prices, and in this case the ore’s copper concentration was a crucial factor. Two local geologists onboard seemed enthralled by their initial readings. Leaning over the pile of dark-gray rock that had been dumped onto the rear deck—after it had been smashed into pieces by a large drill—Paul Lahari grabbed some samples and carried them into a cramped prefab shipping container that served as a laboratory. “Anything to do with 0.5 or 1 percent, we’re already excited,” said the Papua New Guinean, who had decades of onshore and offshore mining experience.He was referring to the typical copper concentrations in ore mined on land. Inside the lab he wielded a small instrument that measures x-ray fluorescence, which he said would reveal the elemental composition of each sample. Soon, on its small digital screen, the instrument began to show matches to elements in the periodic table, as well as their estimated concentration in the sample. For copper, it was 12.33 percent. “That’s 10 times more than we get on land,” Lahari said, his voice rising. He noted that the sampling averages so far on the trip had hovered around 7 percent.All 200 tons the Coco recovered and carried onboard would eventually reach an Australian facility, where the rock would be further pulverized. Much smaller samples would then pass through a gauntlet of geochemical tests—heating, fusing, leaching—and the entire batch would be assigned an industry-recognized average copper concentration, or “grade,” alongside a report on the other metals found, including gold.Oceanographers have identified massive sulfide deposits across the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian and Arctic Oceans. Small-scale sample drilling has shown that they often contain similarly high concentrations of copper, alongside zinc and lead. Deposits form close to, if not on, the seafloor surface, meaning there’s far less “overburden”—the valueless material that must be removed to access the ore—than in most land-based mines.Other prospectors have been interested in Solwara’s potential for years. In 2011 executives from Nautilus Minerals, headquartered in Canada, leased the Solwara 1 site from PNG as a 20-year underwater-mining concession. Authorities in the perennially cash-strapped country invested $120 million in the project through a state-owned entity. The country’s taxpayers thus became a junior partner with Nautilus.At the time, Nautilus was hailed as a pioneer—the only company in the world to hold a license for deep-sea mining. But as the project progressed, things went sideways. A coastal nation controls resource exploitation in the waters constituting its exclusive economic zone, which reaches 200 nautical miles out from its shoreline in all directions. Any activities in the international waters between nations’ economic zones, such as deep-sea mining, are regulated by the International Seabed Authority, or ISA, a body established through a treaty sponsored by the United Nations.A Papua New Guinea governor wrote in a statement that he considered the “presence of any [mining] vessel or activity in the area to be illegal.”When PNG issued Nautilus’s license in 2011 for operations in its national waters, it had no specific underwater-mining legislation. The MRA, the country’s mining regulator, issued the license under rules for land-based mining after Nautilus had carried out impact assessments to earn a separate environmental permit. After false starts in sourcing a ship, in 2014 Nautilus commissioned a Chinese shipyard to build a mining vessel, and Nautilus contracted engineers to develop three enormous, tracked vehicles to break up, churn up and then suck up material from a massive sulfide deposit through a mile-long slurry hose connected to the surface vessel. The technique would mean dumping mining water back into the sea—something other mining operators were planning to do, too.But Nautilus began burning through up to $2 million a month, according to 2018 financial disclosures, eventually defaulting on payments to the Chinese shipyard before filing for bankruptcy in 2019. Its remaining assets included the mining permit, a few promising core samples, and the three tracked vehicles, only ever tested in shallow waters, that sat rusting on the edge of PNG’s capital, Port Moresby. After its insolvency, PNG Prime Minister James Marape told a local newspaper that the country had wasted tens of millions of dollars on a “concept that is a total failure.” In 2020 the head of the MRA ruled out any chance of reviving the Solwara project.I disembarked from the Coco less than a day and a half after I had boarded. In blazing afternoon sunshine, a much smaller skiff ferried me back to a remote, pebbly beach on the PNG island of New Ireland. I wanted to know how PNG’s officials and citizens felt about the Coco pulling up their seafloor. A local driver I had hired drove me in the dark over bumpy coastal roads to a guesthouse in the village of Kono.The following morning I sat outside at a rickety wood table, sharing a breakfast of fish, yams and crackers with some of the local men. One of them, Jonathan Mesulam, was a spokesperson for the Alliance of Solwara Warriors, a group that has long demanded a ban on deep-sea mining in the Bismarck Sea. A Fiji-based environmental campaigner had introduced me to him via an encrypted messaging app. As I described what I had seen onboard the Coco, Mesulam shifted from initially incredulous to increasingly agitated. He walked to the home of Kono’s chief, Chris Malagan, to discuss what I had told him ahead of a weekly public meeting Malagan presides over, which attracts many of the village’s 700 residents.Malagan began that afternoon’s meeting underneath large shoreline trees. Nearby, children waded out from the beach to cast lines for small fish in the shallows close to more than a dozen mud and straw huts. Adults sitting among the trees listened intently to Mesulam’s description of the Coco’s operations, which was based on my eyewitness account. Several people stood up to angrily denounce activities they considered threatening to their fish-centered livelihoods.“People are surprised—they are shocked after learning that the new company’s coming back,” Mesulam told me as villagers drifted away. “After all our efforts on campaigning against seabed mining, we thought it was a dead issue now,” he continued, becoming occasionally tearful. “We don’t want to be used as guinea pigs for trial and error,” he said. “These metals that are going to be dug out of our ocean will not benefit anyone from here because nobody here is using electric cars.”The lack of local awareness and the Coco’s stockpiling of seafloor material seemed unusual for a 21st-century extraction project. To better understand the political support and permitting process for deep-sea mining, I left New Ireland on a plane headed to Port Moresby. The capital, with its sprawling neighborhoods, is built around a spectacular natural harbor. In a hilltop hotel, I told a lawyer named Peter Bosip that I had recently been onboard a deep-sea-mining vessel. He seemed upset. He told me neither Nautilus’s 25-year environmental permit nor the MRA’s subsequently issued mining license for Solwara 1 had ever been made public—despite a constitutionally mandated transparency requirement and a decade-long legal battle waged by good-governance and environmental groups. (Parkinson sent me the cover page of the license, but neither he nor Magellan nor PNG regulators provided a full copy.)Such opaqueness was common in PNG, Bosip told me, but meant it was difficult for local communities to hold international companies to account for potential environmental infractions. Bosip is executive director of the Center for Environmental Law and Community Rights in PNG, a public-interest law firm that sued the government for access to the Solwara permit documents. “In PNG,” he told me, “the system is such a way that the responses are not forthcoming.” He apparently meant that government ministries, agencies and regulators rarely shared information willingly.DSMF provided the struggling Nautilus with high-interest loans, and during the 2019 bankruptcy proceedings, the company took possession of Nautilus’s Solwara 1 license. A document from the Supreme Court of British Columbia shows that DSMF’s listed representatives during those proceedings were Christopher Jordinson, an Australian who’d previously pled guilty to insider trading, and Matthias Bolliger, a Swiss national who was subsequently barred from directorships on the Isle of Man. Documents from the bankruptcy proceedings show the pair are listed as points of contact for DSMF’s largest shareholders: Omani tycoon Mohammed Al Barwani, whose family firm owns oil, gas and mining subsidiaries, and Alisher Usmanov, who is among Russia’s wealthiest pro-Putin oligarchs. Usmanov had been involved in Solwara-based mining for almost 20 years, but now—after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022—he tops worldwide sanctions lists.In July 2022 DSMF joined forces with SM2, another company founded by Parkinson, who in turn hired his firm Magellan to operate in PNG waters under Nautilus’s original license. Parkinson told me that in November 2023 he, Bolliger and Jordinson met with New Ireland’s governor. Sometime later various PNG agencies, including the MRA, approved the new mining technique.I spent days chasing down officials across Port Moresby, trying to get clarity on this approval process. After unanswered e-mails and unreturned phone calls, I finally reached the MRA’s managing director, Jerry Garry, by video call. He was in a remote highland region that was slated to host a gold mine, he said, but he told me his officials should be onboard any deep-sea-mining vessel in PNG to monitor operations. When I noted none had been onboard the Coco, he insisted he had no idea the Coco was even in the Bismarck Sea. Garry never again answered my calls.PNG’s attorney general, Pila Kole Niningi, didn’t reply to interview requests. I did reach Fiona Pagla, the PNG Department of Justice’s acting director for the national oceans office, who was at a conference in Bali. She told me that she knew nothing about the Coco but that if it was conducting marine scientific research, a committee inside her department should have been asked for approval. Hours later, when I pressed her for details in WhatsApp messages, Pagla replied, “No comment.”The country’s environment minister, Simon Kilepa, didn’t make himself available for an interview. Jude Tukuliya, head of the PNG Conservation and Environment Protection Authority, and officials at the country’s National Fisheries Authority did not respond to calls and written questions about the Coco and DSMF. Prime Minister Marape’s chief of staff insisted the premier would not discuss deep-sea mining.After returning to London, where I live, I continued my attempted outreach from afar. Late last summer DSMF’s website was taken down and replaced with a fresh one featuring a new entity called Sustainable Mining Solutions (SMS), billed as a joint venture between DSMF and Parkinson’s SM2. The site repeatedly mentioned Nautilus’s mining license and environmental permits—still not public—and said PNG would gain from Solwara 1’s profits and mining royalties, with benefits for local people “currently being negotiated.” Parkinson had told me soon after I’d left the Coco that Magellan and SM2 were not “cutting corners” and were “operating within the laws of that country.” He had also said the Australian lab readings indicated Solwara 1 is “a credible source of copper.” In response to a request for comment I sent in March by e-mail, DSMF wrote that the results “will be provided to the relevant regulatory authorities in due course, once the analyses by internal and third-party experts are completed.”This past January I finally, and unexpectedly, heard from Julius Chan, a PNG prime minister turned New Ireland governor with a national parliamentary seat. He’d previously said deep-sea miners should engage with islanders to provide confidence that a project wouldn’t affect their livelihoods. He wrote in a statement that those involved in Solwara “certainly do not have my government support and approval” and that he considered the “presence of any vessel or activity in the area to be illegal.” He died three weeks later at age 85. In its e-mail response, DSMF wrote, “The Solwara 1 project is compliant with the regulations, having secured a valid mining license as defined in the PNG Mining Act, and is a fully permitted project having met license requirements under relevant Papua New Guinea laws and regulations.” It also noted that “the allowable impacts of mining at Solwara 1 are regulated, managed and conducted in accordance with the Mining Law and Environmental Act (2000).”The Magellan team onboard the Coco had told me it was operating with permission from the MRA, and Parkinson told me before and after my visit to PNG that government officials were aware and supportive of their large-scale extraction tests. Perhaps some people inside the government had not shared details of the Coco’s mission as widely as they could have, I reasoned. But when I was onboard, there seemed to be little stopping the Solwara 1 project from scaling up significantly—unless steep capital costs somehow dissuaded deep-pocketed investors or public uproar in PNG forced a rethink among national politicians, who perhaps might have been hoping to recoup the sizable state investment Nautilus once blew through.What is clear is that deep-sea mining on a commercial scale will begin soon somewhere. Norway, the Cook Islands, Japan and Sweden have approved deep-sea mining in their exclusive economic zones. Norway’s offshore-resources agency says the country’s waters contain manganese crusts, as well as sulfide deposits, and the government had considered awarding exploitation licenses this year. Authorities in the Cook Islands have issued exploration licenses to three operators surveying for polymetallic nodules. Scientists at the University of Tokyo and collaborating institutions recently confirmed a vast nodule field close to Japan’s easternmost island, a tiny atoll called Minamitorishima. Estimates indicate the field contains more than 600,000 tons of cobalt—much more than the total 2023 output from the Democratic Republic of Congo, by far the largest global cobalt producer.A consortium of government agencies, academic institutions and private enterprises plans to extract Japan’s underwater resources in the decades ahead. With enormous deep-sea regions still unmapped, scientists say similar opportunities exist elsewhere. But after a 2023 study found that some polymetallic nodules emitted enough radiation that inappropriate handling could pose health risks, questions have increased about the wisdom of nodule mining. Citing limited scientific data on long-term environmental impacts, many nations, including Germany, Spain and Chile, have called for a pause. Palau and Fiji have advocated for a moratorium, and France wants an outright ban.The ISA has granted more than 30 exploration licenses for international waters, some for each of the three kinds of deposits. It has repeatedly delayed a framework for exploitation licenses, though, to the frustration of some people in the mining industry. The authority’s new secretary-general, Brazilian oceanographer Leticia Carvalho, took charge in January 2025, promising to end what she considers cozy relations between ISA and potential commercial operators. She has also suggested that the new subsea-mining code should be finalized by late this year.Unlike in the early years of, say, coal mining, environmental scientists are deeply involved in the development of seafloor extraction. But much remains unknown about the impacts. Scant studies exist on the consequences for marine life of sulfide-deposit mining like the Coco was carrying out. A case study involving Japanese state entities digging sulfides at a similar depth, several thousand miles north in the Pacific Ocean, gives some idea of what to expect. Researchers assessed the impact on nearby ocean flora and fauna for three years after a brief mining session. They found that populations of organisms less than a tenth of an inch in size may return to normal levels within a year, but larger species may remain depleted more than three years later. That mining lasted only six hours.In its statement, DSMF wrote, “Extensive scientific studies have enabled SMS to assess the risks to marine ecosystems and carefully weigh them against the damage caused by terrestrial mining.” The new SMS website says mining in Solwara 1 “will not adversely affect the marine life habitat” and that with recolonization efforts, three years after mining ends, the environment around any vents will “resemble the pre-mining condition of biomass and diversity.” Marine scientists I spoke to questioned that assertion. The ecosystem will not recover “unless the chemistry and the substrate and the texture and the morphology of the bottom, and the temperature and everything else, are what they were” before a location was disturbed, says Lisa Levin, professor emerita of biological oceanography and marine ecology at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. “It couldn’t possibly be.” She says certain species exist only near these vents, and after mining it’s “highly likely” those species will become extinct. “People have to be willing to give up the seafloor ecosystems if they want to mine them,” Levin says. She adds that the contamination of fish stocks by chemicals from the seafloor should reasonably concern local societies.Throughout the world’s deep ocean zones, where scientists estimate thousands of species remain undiscovered, heavy mining equipment may harm organisms that are unable to quickly move out of its way. Leaks from mining equipment or mining water dumped from surface vessels could also threaten open-ocean fisheries, and noise and light pollution could impact reproduction or feeding patterns of species already threatened by other human actions. The environmental team onboard the Coco was clearly aware of some of these potential consequences.The juxtapositions I experienced at sea and on land were jarring. The extraordinary scale and power of the Coco’s technology, backed by distant billionaires, were in sharp contrast to subsistence communities where villagers paddle canoes into the surf to fish by hand. The informational asymmetry was striking, too: hydrographers, geologists and environmental scientists with millions of data points designed to gauge surroundings—and profits to be realized thousands of miles away—were set against local residents who seemed to lack access to attested Solwara permits, let alone details of possible environmental drawbacks. For the people who live there, short-term benefits—new local jobs, perhaps, or increased government revenues—might never outweigh stress to the ecosystem and a way of life that depends on it.As this article was going to press, senior PNG officials—including one in the country’s Department of Justice—told me the questions I had asked during my reporting had prompted action. In late February the government introduced new mining legislation that, for the first time, includes specific rules for deep-sea mining. The country’s Marine Scientific Research Committee, which comprises almost two dozen government entities, passed guidelines that will require future deep-sea-mining licenses to have committee approval. Because the legislation is open to public comment, it is not yet clear whether a new mining law will have retroactive force. If it does, officials told me, DSMF might have to reapply for its environmental permits and mining license and publish a fresh environmental impact assessment.Some of the reporting for this story was originally done while Willem Marx was on assignment for PBS.
