The presence of large stores of minerals in the deep ocean has been known for more than half a century. The possibilities for commercial harvesting of these deposits – rich in valuable metals, including zinc, cobalt, copper, nickel and gold – were being discussed as far back as the 1970s, but only in the last few years has large-scale extraction of these resources come to be considered a realistic possibility.

Advances in deep-sea technology and growing demand for the metals now known to exist in abundance on the ocean floor, such as cobalt and nickel, have led to renewed attention and investment in deep-sea mining. While the technological and economic viability of this expensive and complex form of resource extraction are still unclear, interest in large-scale seafloor mining is on the rise. Read more ›