The Metals Company seeks to mine polymetallic nodules from the Clarion-Clipperton Zone without finalized ISA regulations, threatening ecosystems that take millions of years to form

The Metals Company (TMC), backed by a March 2025 U.S. announcement to unilaterally explore commercial seabed mining, plans to extract polymetallic nodules containing nickel, cobalt, manganese, and copper from the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) in the central Pacific -- a 4.5 million square kilometer abyssal plain. The International Seabed Authority (ISA) was expected to finalize commercial mining regulations by July 2025 but failed to reach consensus, pushing negotiations to 2026. Meanwhile, Loke Marine Minerals (Norway) filed for bankruptcy, highlighting the sector's financial instability. Why it matters: Polymetallic nodules take 10-15 million years to form and host unique ecosystems including species found nowhere else on Earth, so collector vehicles scraping the seafloor would destroy these habitats irreversibly across mining claim areas spanning thousands of square kilometers, so sediment plumes generated by extraction machinery would travel hundreds of kilometers in deep-ocean currents and smother filter-feeding organisms across a far larger area than the direct mining footprint, so mid-water column noise and light pollution from riser systems pumping slurry to surface vessels would disrupt deep-sea species whose biology is adapted to perpetual darkness and silence, so the cumulative impact on carbon sequestration, nutrient cycling, and biodiversity in Earth's largest biome -- the deep ocean -- is essentially unknown because fewer than 1% of deep-sea species have been described by science. The structural root cause is that the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea designated deep-sea mineral resources as the 'common heritage of mankind' governed by the ISA, but the ISA's 168-member structure creates gridlock on regulations while individual nations (notably the U.S., which never ratified UNCLOS) can pursue unilateral extraction, and the economic demand for nickel and cobalt for EV batteries creates pressure to mine before environmental baselines are established or regulatory frameworks exist.