| Not too long ago, geologically speaking, a certain black rock was lying roughly 3 miles underwater, nestled in the sediment of the ocean floor. Then someone scooped it up. Now the knobby stone sits in WIRED's offices, and staffers call it Lisa. It fits in the palm of your hand, and it leaves black dust on your fingers as you turn it, examine it, consider its twist of fate. Someone bothered to retrieve Lisa from the darkest depths because its constituent elements are suddenly hot. Over millions of years, Lisa and trillions of other stones slowly accumulated waterborne flecks of metal—nickel, cobalt, copper, manganese. Those happen to be critical ingredients of electric car batteries. The more people buy EVs, the more manufacturers and mining corporations scramble for raw materials. Nearly two dozen companies and governments hold permits to explore rich deposits in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Ocean. And one outfit—The Metals Company—is gunning to start full-scale sea mining as soon as 2024. The Metals Company has already shown that its tractor-sized mining robot can travel all the way down to the seabed, kick up rocks and clouds of sediment, and haul them up through a hose to the surface. If the company starts mining for real, marine ecosystems will certainly take a hit. The wretched irony, of course, is that all these minerals are supposed to help the environment. As we transition to green technologies, writer Vince Beiser asks, how much ocean are we willing to sacrifice? – Sandra Upson | Features Editor |
