Deep Sea

The Japan “Ring Of Fire” Expedition explored some of the deepest parts of the ocean and documented nearly 30,000 organisms. This executive order on deep-sea mining serves as an extension to President Trump’s earlier order in March 2025 to increase domestic investment in mineral production. President Trump’s previous executive order, “Immediate Measures to Increase American Mineral Production,” loosened Federal regulation on mineral production to increase the US’s ability to compete with global mineral production. By allowing the US to issue its own permits beyond its national border in EEZs, this executive order positions itself against the ISA. The deep sea is Earth’s last frontier, and exploring and protecting it allows us to uncover the secrets of a world that’s both ancient and ever-evolving.

Council’s hands ‘completely tied’ on land access

Deep-sea mining aims to retrieve valuable mineral deposits found on the ocean’s floor, hundreds or even thousands of meters below its surface.
Once the flesh has been stripped and consumed by predators, bone eaters arrive so that not even the skeleton will remain.
The metals they contain could prove toxic to some forms of marine life and could, potentially, get into the marine food chain.
While some species may be more resistant to stress than others, the goal is to integrate various data types to evaluate the overall impact.
Alongside legal and extractive frameworks, alternative imaginaries—such as those inspired by Drexciyan mythology—disrupt dominant logics of ownership and exploitation.
Deep-sea creatures in the trenches of Japan’s volcanically active “Ring of Fire” belt are rapidly adapting to immense depths, scientists found.
There is also a range of research efforts underway to obtain the necessary minerals without mining virgin land, including recovery from coal waste or hard rock mine tailings.

Like shallow-water corals, deep-sea corals may exist as individual coral polyps, as diversely-shaped colonies containing many polyps of the same individual, and as reefs with many colonies made up of one or more species. They also serve as a habitat for deep sea creatures like sea stars and sharks. They obtain the energy and nutrients they need to survive by trapping tiny organisms in their polyps from passing currents. The most important food source for deep-sea organisms is particulate organic matter, which drifts down from the surface to the seafloor and is also known as “marine snow”.

China’s Energy Motivations

Some countries and companies have already begun exploring underwater mineral deposits and mining techniques — but the prospect of deep-sea mining remains controversial. Many fear that extracting minerals from it could pose grave consequences for both marine life and planetary health. The deep sea is home to natural resources that have been a subject of interest since the 1970s. These include manganese nodules, which can be found on the ocean floor at a depth of more than 4,000 metres, especially in the Pacific. In addition to manganese and iron, these clumps contain valuable metals like copper, nickel and cobalt.
But we’re now able to explore more and more parts of this remote realm—thanks to a new generation of incredible underwater vehicles. Also known as the twilight zone, this area receives only faint, filtered sunlight, allowing no photosynthetic organisms to survive. Many animals have adapted to the near-darkness with large eyes and counterillumination.
Tethered to a life at the surface because they require breathable oxygen, many large animals will make impressive dives to the deep sea in search of their favorite foods. Sperm whales, southern elephant seals, leatherback sea turtles, emperor penguins, and beaked whales are especially good divers. A Cuvier’s beaked whale is known to dive 9,816 feet (2,992 m) deep, and can stay down as long and 3 hours and 42 minutes, making it the deepest diving mammal in the world. As the sun sets, fish and zooplankton make massive migrations from the depths up to the ocean’s surface. Despite their small size (some no bigger than a mosquito), these creatures can travel hundreds of meters in just a few hours.

It is a cold and dark place that lies between 3,000 and 6,000 meters below the sea surface. It is also home to squat lobsters, red prawns, and various species of sea cucumbers. Bits of decaying matter and excretions from thousands of meters above must trickle down to the seafloor, with only a small fraction escaping the hungry jaws of creatures above. Less than five percent of food produced at the surface will make its way to the abyssal plain. When the phytoplankton are gone, the animals that grew quickly to eat them die and sink to the seafloor. Finally, for the exploration of deep-sea mineral resources to continue, regulations should be transparent and collaborative, with participation from interested parties and key stakeholders — including ISA members, mining corporations and scientists.

Diving deep

Yet significant uncertainties remain about the environmental impacts of this proposed industry, in which miners would send heavy machinery into the deep ocean to collect valuable minerals, such as manganese, cobalt, copper and nickel. Some animals can thrive by feeding on marine snow.2 In 1960, a bathyscaphe called Trieste went down to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, which is the deepest point on Earth. There aren’t any plants at all in these depths, so all fish in the deep are carnivores. This article will dive into the depths of the deep sea, exploring its characteristics, life forms, and why it is essential for the Earth’s health. In July 2025, a request was made for the ISA Secretariat to investigate whether deep-sea mining companies applying for licenses and permits under the United States’ mining code are at risk of violating existing ISA exploration contracts. UNCLOS prohibits unilateral mining activities, and mining companies may have exploration contracts revoked if found to be in violation of this.
These liquids and gases are made up of hydrogen and carbon molecules, like methane. Microbes near cold seeps gain energy through chemical reactions, and then pass the energy to symbiotic partners like tubeworms, clams, or mussels. These brine lakes are a remnant of ancient seas that existed when dinosaurs roamed on land. Millions of years ago, during the Jurassic Period, a shallow sea existed where the Gulf of Mexico now sits. Cut off from the rest of the world’s oceans, the sea slowly evaporated, leaving behind a layer of salt up to 5 miles deep in some locations.

Is Deep-Sea Mining Necessary?

The biotic communities differ according to the water depth, and their occurrence chiefly depends on the available nutrients.
This progression has made the submarine world simultaneously more comprehensible and more fantastical (Helmreich 2009).
In 1513, trying to secure that channel to Portugal, Afonso de Albuquerque laid siege to Aden21 but was forced to retreat.
However, he noted that the biggest threat to many shark, ray and chimaera species is still overfishing.
It extends from 19,700 feet (6,000 meters) to the very bottom of the Mariana Trench at 36,070 feet (10,994 meters).
However, statements from the US government in April 2025 resurfaced this issue of deep-sea mining regulation.

In these areas, seawater seeps into cracks in the seafloor, heating up as it meets molten rock beneath the crust and then rising again to gush out of seafloor openings. The water that emerges from them can reach temperatures of 400 °C and is extremely rich in minerals. Cold seeps are similar to hydrothermal vents as they also occur in tectonically active locations, but they emit hydrocarbon-rich fluids. The palette ranges from plastic bags and fragments, to glass bottles and the remains of fishing nets, to paint buckets. Packages and bags have been discovered that have apparently been on the seafloor for decades, virtually untouched by time.

Canyons and Seamounts

In popular imaginaries of the deep sea, expanding tendrils of fluid and smoke continue to evoke associations with war, fire, and contamination, ‘connected to hell itself’ (Ballard 2023). A realm governed by the vast timescales of geological and ecological processes—what Richard Irvine (2014) calls ‘deep time’—the deep sea has become a major geopolitical issue (Hannigan 2016), caught in a clash of competing temporalities. Despite the inherently slow epistemic process, scientists are working with urgency to fill critical knowledge gaps about its ecosystems before the accelerating mineral rush begins. In this high-stakes context, ‘getting (down) there’ is not only about reaching physical depths but also about navigating the tension between ocean preservation and industrial exploitation. Soon the skeleton is picked clean, but the fall is far from nutrient depleted.
This can already be seen in Fram Strait between Svalbard and Greenland, where the composition of the phytoplankton has changed. Whereas, in past decades, more diatoms grew in the colder water, today you’ll find more foam algae. As a result, the amount of food drifting down from the surface to the deep has declined over the past 20 years. For example, there are only roughly half as many nematodes in the deep-sea sediment as in the past. And where there are fewer smaller organisms, there will eventually be fewer of the larger ones. As such, it’s quite possible that climate change will reduce diversity in the biotic communities of Fram Strait.
Each species plays a role in the delicate balance of marine ecosystems, highlighting the importance of protecting this incredible part of our world. The deep water column, from 200 meters below the surface down to the seafloor, accounts for more than 95% of the volume of the ocean. It is vital to many of Earth’s regulatory processes, including nutrient cycling, carbon cycling and storage, and heat absorption.
The further we dive down from the surface, the less Deep Sea new food is available, making the fight to survive that much more challenging. Despite these harsh conditions, there is life—an astounding variety of creatures that will boggle your mind. You can’t dive to the deep ocean on your own, of course, but scientists have a variety of sophisticated technologies to explore this vast frontier.