You may be hearing a lot lately about critical minerals and rare earth elements. These natural materials are essential to industry and modern technology – everything from cellphones to fighter jets.

Governments face pressure to delay seabed mining as legal risks, fragile ecosystems and global treaty commitments collide.

A discussion of deep-sea mining of critical minerals on the ocean floor, the importance of critical minerals for the clean energy transition, the global and national approaches to regulating the ...

The path to the world’s technological future could be found on the deep ocean floor. But that path may come at a high price. The debate centers on critical minerals embedded in rocks on the seabed.

Even as opposition grows and the U.S. territory maintains a moratorium on seabed mining, NOAA began a $20 million survey of ...

A cnidarian is attached to a dead sponge stalk on a manganese nodule in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. Diva Amon and Craig Smith, University of Hawaii at Mānoa Picture an ocean world so deep and dark it ...

Deep-sea mining targets mineral deposits on the ocean floor, typically at depths of 3,000–6,000 meters. Most attention focuses on polymetallic nodules—potato-sized rocks lying on abyssal plains—and on ...

Somewhere in the North Atlantic, more than a kilometer beneath its surface, a cold-water coral reef stretches across an ...

Along certain parts of the ocean floor lies a bounty of rare minerals and metals, critical components for batteries, electric cars and other electronics. But mining for them in the deep sea is a ...

As demand for critical minerals surges around the world, countries are debating whether to mine the untapped deep-sea reserves of cobalt, copper and manganese, miles below the surface. But a growing ...

Certain areas of the deep seabed beyond national jurisdiction are rich in deposits of polymetallic nodules, which contain concentrations of critical minerals important for industrial development such ...

In the global race for critical minerals, one little-known international agency has long held the keys to a potential motherlode — vast quantities of metals located on the remote seafloor. The ...