The seabed is legally designated as the “common heritage of mankind,” but in practice, it has become a hotly contested frontier.
This is exemplified by the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), a vast expanse of international seabed located between Hawaii and Mexico rich in polymetallic nodules that contain critical minerals such as nickel, cobalt, copper, and manganese.
These resources are more than mere commodities; they are vital components of national strategies for energy independence, technological leadership and strategic deterrence.
Unlike land-based domains, where national borders delineate access, the seabed remains governed by a patchwork of international conventions and non-binding regulatory frameworks.
This legal ambiguity, combined with the CCZ’s sheer scale (approximately 4.5 million square kilometers), recasts geography as a determinant of power. Here, the terrain imposes its own rules: no nation can claim legal sovereignty, yet every technologically capable actor can exert functional control.
The strategic function of the seabed lies not in symbolic possession, requiring engagement with multilateral bodies like the International Seabed Authority (ISA), but in continuous operational oversight enforced through submersibles, dredging platforms and state-backed maritime infrastructure.
Through these instruments, nations could transform the legal status of the seabed from a global commons into de facto geopolitical claims, not to share, not to protect, but to secure.
Navigating the seabed divide
No rivalry illustrates the emerging dynamics of seabed geopolitics more vividly than that between the United States and China. These two powers approach deep-sea mining from fundamentally different institutional positions, strategic cultures and timelines.
China, with its disciplined alignment of state power and long-term industrial planning, has embedded itself within ISA’s multilateral framework. It holds more seabed exploration licenses than any other country and has cultivated influence within ISA rulemaking bodies.
Chinese actors do not rely on rhetorical commitments to international law; instead, they utilize procedural participation as a mechanism to steer the outcome of regulatory frameworks.
Their objective is clear: to shape the rules before they are finalized, ensuring that China’s technological, legal and operational advantages are permanently encoded into the structure of global seabed governance.
The US, in contrast, approaches the seabed from a structurally distinct position. Excluded from ISA by virtue of not ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the US has pivoted to a strategy of unilateralism, issuing domestic legal authorizations and executive directives to fast-track seabed mining.
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.
These effects unfold on spatial and temporal scales that transcend immediate accountability. Damage incurred in the hadal depths will not register in electoral cycles or quarterly earnings.
This externalization of environmental costs is structurally embedded. States and corporations reap concentrated benefits (strategic minerals, technological primacy, economic gain), while the ecological liabilities are diffused across a global commons and deferred into an indeterminate future.
The legal framework that will govern these activities, particularly ISA’s provisional mining code, lacks both clarity and enforceability. In this vacuum, environmental safeguards function less as constraints than as negotiable instruments.
Where conservation discourse exists, it is often instrumental. Calls for moratoriums or environmental safeguards serve as tools of diplomatic leverage or political differentiation rather than as expressions of systemic restraint. The logic of extraction, once engaged, prioritizes continuity; regulatory caution is outpaced by technological momentum.
This is a structurally induced outcome of a system where access is governed less by rules than by capabilities. Control over seabed minerals is increasingly a function of who can act first, remain longest and extract most efficiently.
Precedent supplants principle. The seabed will be shaped through deployments, licenses and machinery already descending into the depths. For states seeking mineral security and strategic autonomy, the calculus is clear: defer the ecological reckoning and secure the resource base now.
Paulo Aguiar earned a master’s degree in International Relations from NOVA University Lisbon, specializing in Realism, Classical Geopolitics and Strategy. As a professional in geopolitical risk analysis and strategic foresight, Paulo regularly shares his insights through various publications and on his own Substack.
