The Race to Mine the Deep Sea Is On

California Firm Competes to Recover Rare-Earth Minerals—without Disturbing Habitats 

By Mark Smith*

Impossible Metals cofounders Jason Gillham and Oliver Gunasekara, with the Eureka II deep-sea mining vehicle. Photo courtesy of Impossible Metals

It was Captain Nemo in Jules Verne’s classic novel, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, who called the ocean “the vast reservoir of nature.”

While people may be used to the notions of fishing for food and drilling for oil and gas, another marine resource has increasingly caught the attention of governments and companies: metals and rare-earth minerals.

Since oceans cover three-quarters of the Earth, there are not yet estimates of how many millions—or more—tons of rare-earth minerals may be harvestable from seabeds. However, in January 2026, the Japanese Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology is sending a scientific vessel to collect such materials. “The crew will lower a pipe 5,500 meters [3.4 miles] to the seabed to retrieve 35 metric tons of mud, which is estimated to contain 2 kilograms [4.4 pounds] of rare earth elements per ton,” said an article by RawMaterials.net, citing a July news report in Nikkei Asia.

More than a decade ago, researchers with this same Japanese agency reported that a sampling of 78 Pacific Ocean seabed sites revealed that a third held a bounty of metals and rare-earth minerals. “We estimate that an area of just 1 square kilometer surrounding one of the sampling sites could provide one-fifth of the current annual world consumption of these elements,” researcher Yasuhiro Kato wrote in a July 2011 article in Nature GeoScience .

While the world scrambles to grasp the opportunities for seabed mining for rare-earth minerals and metals, what is not in doubt is the immense and growing demand for these materials.

The rare-earth metals market was pegged at $15.3 billion in 2023 and projected to virtually double to $30.1 billion by 2032, according to Global Market Insights. 

According to Adamas Inside, the electric vehicle industry alone required 2.2 million tons of nickel, manganese, lithium, iron, graphite, and cobalt to launch “newly sold” EV batteries onto global roadways in 2024, with the International Energy Agency (IEA) projecting the demand from that sector could grow by a factor of 30 by 2040. It should be noted that the IEA does project a slowdown and gradual decline in cobalt demand and mining requirements starting from around 2030 to 2040.

The Quest for Minerals

These vital resources have mostly been found on land until now, with trees, soil, and whole communities sometimes upended to make way for exploration and mining. Mine locations have also led to geopolitical concerns, with the US government especially worried about how much of these operations are controlled by China.

And so, it is to the ocean depths that stakeholders are turning. A bountiful hunting ground it is, with potato-sized polymetallic rocks or ”nodules” littering the ocean floor in places. They contain precious resources such as nickel, cobalt, copper, and manganese.

Investigating the impact that potential manganese nodule mining in the deep sea would have on ecosystems there. The image shows "nodule frames" for a “recolonization” experiment. ROV-Team/GEOMAR/Wikimedia CCA 4.0 International

The race is on to harvest them, so much so that a bill was recently introduced in the US Senate—the Revitalizing America's Offshore Critical Minerals Dominance Act of 2025—that seeks to speed up mining by expediting licenses and partnership agreements and increasing mapping operations of the seabed to source new mineral deposits.

This desire to delve into the depths is leading to a new “gold rush.” But if it is not managed correctly, many experts fear untold and perhaps irreversible damage could be done to underwater habitats, with unfathomable consequences for all.

Dangers of Deep-Sea Mining

To extract nodules, undersea vehicles usually dredge the seabed to harvest them, disturbing the seafloor and its delicate ecosystem. One recent study by the University of Hawaii raised fears that deep-sea mining could also harm the abyssal benthic boundary layer—a habitat that lives just a few meters above the ocean floor.

One recent study by the University of Hawaii raised fears that deep-sea mining could also harm the abyssal benthic boundary layer—a habitat that lives just a few meters above the ocean floor.

Professor Lisa Levin. Photo courtesy of Lisa Levin

Concerns have also been raised by experts such as Lisa Levin, a Distinguished Professor Emerita of biological oceanography and marine ecology at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California San Diego. In an exclusive interview, she told The Earth & I that the survival of much of the biodiversity at those depths depends on the nodules.

“Around 50% of the biodiversity in nodule zones depends on the nodules,” she said, “and nodules take millions of years to form.” And she warned that even if ecosystem recovery occurred after a disturbance, it would take many years to do so. “Many deep-sea animals grow slowly and live a long time, so recovery will be slow,” she added.

There are also many unknowns about life at those depths.

“Most of the biodiversity in the targeted system remains undescribed, with unknown functions,” she said. “Those species known show some limited spatial distributions, so loss of connectivity or even functional extinction is possible.”

Pollution from disturbing the ocean floor is also a concern, with plumes of waste and sediment traveling distances of up to hundreds of kilometers. “Plumes can smother animals on the seafloor and harm plankton,” Levin added. “It may clog filtering apparatus, contain harmful metals or radioactivity released from the seafloor.”

She said the spread of plumes to coastal states could also harm shallow-water ecosystems and fisheries.

Conscientious Seabed Mining 

With concerns increasingly being raised over the dangers of this type of mining, efforts are increasing to try and find safer but still effective ways to do it. One company trying to innovate in the field is Impossible Metals, headquartered in San Jose, California.

Impossible Metals’ robotics team with Eureka I. Photo courtesy of Impossible Metals

Describing its mission as “seabed collecting without destroying the habitat,” Impossible Metals is developing autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that “hover” over the seabed rather than dredging it. The vehicles also use AI-enabled vision to spot larger life forms and avoid them, while removing the nodules with robotic arms and hauling them up to a surface vessel.

The vehicles also use AI-enabled vision to spot larger life forms and avoid them, while removing the nodules with robotic arms and hauling them up to a surface vessel.

Having developed its proof of concept Eureka vehicle, the company tested Eureka II in November last year and will test Eureka III next year. This scaled-up version of Eureka II will have an increased payload, rising from 100 kg (220 lbs) to 4,000 kg (8,818 lbs), and has an improved battery.

Eventually, the company hopes to deploy multiple Eureka vehicles at the same time.

Testing Eureka II at sea. Photo courtesy of Impossible Metals

Co-founder Oliver Gunasekara told The Earth and I: “Because it has a very powerful Nvidia GPU on board, it will detect life and effectively quarantine that area and not disturb it.” A GPU, or graphics processing unit, is an electronic circuit that allows visualization of digital images.

But while its cameras can detect larger creatures, they cannot spot microbial or tiny life—which has been a criticism from some quarters.

He said the company’s approach is to ensure disturbance of the seabed is kept to a minimum. 

Oliver Gunasekara. Photo courtesy of Impossible Metals 

Gunasekara—who said he was inspired to get into the decarbonization struggle after seeing the impact of the 2020 California wildfires—added: “The vehicle is hovering. It doesn’t land. We decide to take, say, 40% of the nodules, leaving 60% behind. “That's a threshold we can program in software but that preserves all of the biodiversity and life of the microscopic type that lives both on the nodules and on the seabed.”

Governments and regulatory bodies have shown interest in Impossible Metals’ approach. The company announced in a press briefing this September that Impossible Metals Bahrain, sponsored by the Kingdom of Bahrain, has submitted an application with the International Seabed Authority (ISA) for an exploration license for polymetallic nodules in international waters. 

ISA Secretary General Leticia Carvalho stated in the briefing that “this partnership champions a forward-looking vision that is leveraging the technological leaps and bounds that can help overcome environmental challenges and power deep-sea pursuits that are anchored in the principles of sustainability.”

A Delicate Balancing Act

One of the major ironies of the deep-sea mining conundrum is that a lot of the metals and minerals involved are needed to power green technologies such as wind and solar power, but the miners run the risk of helping the world above the waves at the expense of the one below. The damage done could have repercussions that even the best experts are not yet aware of.

Time will tell if unique solutions via technology can mitigate as much of the disruption as possible. 

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*Mark Smith is a journalist and author from the UK. He has written on subjects ranging from business and technology to world affairs, history, and popular culture for the Guardian, BBC, Telegraph, and magazines in the United States, Europe, and Southeast Asia.