Hot Race For Pacific's Deep Sea Mineral Wealth

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This approach reflects a response to structural vulnerability, namely, dependence on adversarial supply chains for critical minerals. Where China exerts slow, cumulative influence through institutional immersion, the US acts with urgency, deploying private capital and regulatory agility to compensate for its formal absence from multilateral governance.

This creates a bifurcated architecture: China seeks to control the framework, while the US seeks to operate around it. Yet the underlying motive is the same: strategic insulation from resource dependence and competitive positioning in a rapidly hardening world order. Neither strategy is inherently more subversive, but each perceives the other as destabilizing.

Thus, the arena of deep-sea governance becomes not a neutral venue for coordination but a contested space where procedural legitimacy and strategic autonomy collide.

Strategic Pacific seabed

The Clarion-Clipperton Zone spans an area nearly equivalent to the contiguous US, lying beneath international waters between Hawaii and Mexico.

It is home to the planet's richest known reserves of polymetallic nodules, mineral formations laden with cobalt, nickel, and manganese. What makes this zone strategic is not its legal status but its vast, flat and sediment-stable characteristics. It is ideally suited for industrial-scale extraction.

The CCZ is administered by ISA, which has parceled the zone into discrete license blocks awarded to sponsoring states and corporate entities. On paper, this fragmentation allows for coordination and environmental oversight.

In reality, it institutionalizes competition. Each block becomes a fiefdom of strategic value where companies and their state sponsors conduct exploration, environmental assessments and, soon, large-scale extraction.

States and corporations with deep technological capabilities, including China, Canada (via The Metals Company ), Belgium (GSR ), and Norway (Loke ), have already deployed robotic vehicles, data-gathering systems and prototype harvesting equipment in the CCZ.

These activities are not speculative; they are strategic acts of presence. By maintaining operational continuity and exclusive data on their contract areas, these actors secure a level of control that resembles territorial influence, even in the absence of sovereignty.

States with territorial assets proximate to the CCZ, such as France's Clipperton Island, gain further leverage by using these holdings as logistical hubs or jurisdictional springboards. Thus, the geography of deep-sea mining is simultaneously physical, institutional and infrastructural. It maps the extension of national strategy into an unbounded, submerged arena.

Precarious microstate power

Pacific Island nations occupy a pivotal yet precarious position in the geopolitical structure of deep-sea mining. These states are not themselves extractive powers, but their legal status as coastal states and ISA members renders them indispensable intermediaries in the resource acquisition strategies of others.

Countries like the Cook Islands, Nauru and Tonga act as sponsor states for foreign companies, enabling exploration contracts under ISA rules. In exchange, they receive royalties, infrastructure aid, and diplomatic engagement.

Yet the leverage they wield, rooted in legal procedure rather than material capacity, is increasingly fragile. As major powers deepen their technological reach and begin to act outside ISA frameworks, the value of these sponsorships diminishes.

The internal divisions within the Pacific region, between those pursuing economic opportunity and those advocating environmental caution, further fracture the negotiating position of these states. Their collective influence diminishes as they are drawn into opposing alignments.

This allows external actors to extract favorable terms while offering minimal safeguards in return, rendering the Pacific not just a zone of opportunity but a laboratory for strategic experimentation by larger powers. These microstates thus find themselves navigating between alignment and autonomy.

While they have used their position to secure economic rents and international attention, their ability to influence outcomes is limited by their institutional capacity and the asymmetry of power in these relationships. As multilateral governance erodes, their role risks shifting from active intermediaries to passive theaters of external ambition.

Environmental sacrifice, strategic extraction

Environmental damage from seabed mining is not only likely, but, under current practices and regulatory frameworks, virtually inevitable.

The ecological consequences (destruction of benthic habitats, disruption of deep-ocean food chains, and disturbance of carbon sequestration processes) are well-documented yet remain politically unpriced.