These three vessels, owned by The Metals Company’s strategic partner Allseas, are seen here performing a pilot nodule collection system trial and environmental monitoring program for The Metals Company. Photo courtesy The Metals Company.
Photo courtesy The Metals company
The debate over collecting minerals from the bottom of the deep sea in international waters has gained new urgency ahead of a pending rule-makingdeadline.
As all matter of stakeholders gather in Kingston, Jamaica, to try to reach a consensus over regulation, a fierce debate is growing between supporters who say we need the rules urgently as demand for the minerals at the bottom of the deep sea grows, while opponents argue that the rush to open the seafloor in international waters could be a damaging decision that’s impossible to reverse.
One area of particular focus is a part of the Central Pacific, about 1,000 miles from the coast of Mexico, called the Clarion Clipperton Zone. Proponents say that deep-sea mining there is a less damaging way to gather metals like nickel, copper, manganese and cobalt. That’s especially true when the mining happens in areas like rain forests, which are rich in biodiversity and also serve as major carbon sinks that slow climate change.
“We have to take a planetary perspective. We have to look at the planet as a whole,” said Gerard Barron, the CEO of The Metals Company, which has permits to explore mining in the area under consideration. The Metals Company was founded in 2011, has raised $400 million from investors, and has been working for the last dozen years to do the research and get the regulations completed to be able to collect metals from this region in the deep sea.
“We don’t suggest that there’s zero impact,” Barron said. “But what we do say is that there’s very minimal impact, and we can manage those impacts.”
Opponents of deep-sea mining say there is not enough information to make that kind of decision.
“If mining does move forward, the damage caused will be irreversible,” said Diva Amon, a deep-sea marine biologist who is representing the Deep Ocean Stewardship Initiative.
Deep-sea creatures have adapted over millions of years to living in a dark, quiet place with little sediment. Many of these creatures have unusually long life spans: There are individual corals that have been living for more than 4,000 years and sea sponges that live for 10,000 years, Amon said. It’s also an impressive source of biodiversity, as scientists had never seen 70% to 90% of the many thousands of lifeforms discovered there.
“This is a thriving ecosystem,” Amon said. “Sure, many of the animals are small in size, but that doesn’t make them any less important.”
This image is of a new species from a new order of Cnidaria collected at 4,100 meters in the Clarion Clipperton Zone. This creature depends on sponge stalks attached to nodules to live. Photo courtesy the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Photo courtesy National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Formed in 1996, the ISA has 168 countries as members and issues rules that govern 54% of the world’s oceans — all the oceans outside of the Exclusive Economic Zones of the countries that border them. It’s charged with managing mineral resources in the floor of the ocean “for the benefit of humankind as a whole,” and “has the mandate to ensure the effective protection of the marine environment from harmful effects that may arise from deep-seabed-related activities,” the organization says on its website.
The ISA has granted approvals for 22 contractors to explore metals in the deep seabed, and 19 of these exploration applications are for polymetallic nodules in the Clarion Clipperton Zone.
The Boston Metal Company holds three of the licenses, which it was able to obtain by being sponsored by the tiny Pacific island nations of Nauru, Tonga and Kiribati. But actually taking the metals from the seabed requires an exploitation license.
This map from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows where the nodules are most abundant in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone.
Photo and map courtesy the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
On June 25, 2021, the President of Nauru submitted a letter to the ISA requesting that the organization have the rules and regulations finalized so that this exploitation application could be approved to begin work in two years. That two-year deadline is coming due in a matter of months.
Critics of the idea of deep-sea mining have said the process is being rushed.
The letter from Nauru was submitted “right in the middle of the pandemic when no meetings were held face to face, triggered a rule in the Law of the Sea that puts pressure on the ISA and its member states to finalize regulations within two years – or consider giving Nauru and its company a provisional license to begin mining with no regulations in place,” Jessica Battle, the lead for World Wildlife Fund‘s global No Deep Seabed Mining Initiative, told CNBC.
The rule was meant to be a sort of “safety valve” in case negotiations got stuck, but the negotiations are happening and Battle says that rule has placed too much pressure to reach a decision before all the research is done.
“Should Nauru be given a license, then the race is on to mine the ocean, with unknown but certainly dire consequences for the ocean,” Battle said.
Pradeep Singh, an expert on ocean governance, environmental law and climate policy told CNBC that “allowing mining activities to commence at this point in time would be a decision that could be legally challenged.”
Singh said the future of deep-sea mining is still undecided because it is the ISA’s duty to represent all of the 168 member states’ viewpoints. The members can “agree to delay or postpone” the move to mining.
“Putting legality aside, such a decision would also lack legitimacy,” said Singh, who is a member of the International Union for Conservation of Nature‘s delegation to the ISA. “The ISA was established to act on behalf of humankind as a whole and for the best interest of humankind — and not to promote the interest of industry or rather one private actor in this case.”
Billions of dollars on the line
The looming deadline comes as demand for these metals increases.
Nickel, copper, manganese and cobalt are strategic minerals in the push toward clean energy, as many of them are essential in batteries and electrical infrastructure, according to Andrew Miller, chief operating officer of the metals intelligence company Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.
“There is of course an opportunity for this to fill some of the void facing strategic battery raw material markets over the years to come,” he said.
A a polymetallic nodule collected during environmental baseline campaigns off the floor of the deep sea by The Metals Company.
Photo courtesy The Metals Company
“The drive towards decarbonization requires development of new technologies, which often depend on supply of more scarce or strategic materials,” Miller told CNBC. “If we are to meet these demands, the supply base of these materials will have to scale at an unprecedented rate. That’s what’s behind the drive for diversity of supply on land-based mining, as well as exploration of alternatives such as deep-sea mining.”
Barron estimates that The Metals Company’s single NORI-D Project, has a lifetime adjusted earnings value of $85 billion, after paying about $8.5 billion to the countries that are sponsoring it. And that single project is only about 22% of the total resources the company can claim.
The Metals Company isn’t alone in its interest in the region of the international waters.
On March 16, Norway’s Loke Marine Minerals announced it acquired two deep-sea mineral licenses located in the Clarion Clipperton Zone previously owned by Lockheed Martin’s UK Seabed Resources.
For Barron, seeing Lockheed sell its stake in the space is a positive sign for the industry.
“Lockheed has been a pure passenger in this industry,” Barron told CNBC. “They were there in the 1970s, but they’ve been no help to the industry whatsoever. They are a big name, but they don’t do anything. They are a defense contractor. Their business is making bombs and warplanes. So the fact that we’ve got an active company from Norway, owned by some of the state entities of Norway, I think it’s a massive positive for the industry and we’re delighted about it.”
Finding consensus for the Wild West of the sea
Opponents of deep-sea mining want to tap the brakes. Big companies, including BMW, Google, Patagonia, Samsung, Volkswagen and Volvo have made a public call for a moratorium on the practice.
The pilot nodule collector vehicle designed by Allseas for use by The Metals Company. Photo provided by The Metals Company.
Photo courtesy The Metals Company
The WWF and Greenpeace worked together to coordinate the call to get businesses to sign on to the moratorium.
“Our goal is to eliminate primary users from the market, so that even if the industry passes political hurdles, there will be less of a demand for metals extracted from the seafloor,” said Arlo Hemphill, the global corporate lead of Greenpeace’s Stop Deep Sea Mining Campaign. “Companies like Volkswagen and Google have substantial influence in the countries they work, so their support of the political moratorium on deep-sea mining is also of value here.”
The Metals Company, on the flipside, published on Tuesday a lifecycle assessment finding that determined the environmental impact of the metals coming out of the NORI-D project will be less damaging than land mining for nearly every category of battery components.
But Amon worries that the thesis being measured is wrong in the first place, and that deep-sea mining will simply add to, rather than replace, terrestrial mining.
“What is likely to happen is that if deep-sea mining begins, both will occur, one is not going to cancel out the other,” she said.
She also said that further innovation in battery technology could provide an alternative to the current technologies that are so heavily dependent on these minerals, So the decision shouldn’t be rushed.
A 40-centimeter long elasipod sea cucumber seen here about to be collected as part of an expidition of the Clarion Clipperton Zone by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This sea cucumber has92 feet, seven lips, and numerous spikey processes, and was found at 3,500 meters.
Photo courtesy the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“Ultimately, this is, this is about collective decision making,” Amon said. “We’re talking about areas beyond national jurisdiction, or international waters, which is where mineral resources belong to everyone on the planet.”
But Barron says mining will happen regardless, as the need for these metals is growing. So it’s better to decide than to wait.
“The problem is if we don’t get this agreed, it will just happen without regulations,” Barron said. “And that’s going to be really bad. Imagine that there’s no reporting. You could just not take the care and consideration that companies like us do. It could be the Wild West, and that would be a disaster for our oceans and for our planet.”
Linda Yaccarino, CEO, X/Twitter speaks onstage during Vox Media’s 2023 Code Conference at The Ritz-Carlton, Laguna Niguel on September 27, 2023 in Dana Point, California.
Jerod Harris | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images
Linda Yaccarino on Wednesday announced she is stepping down as CEO of Elon Musk’s social media site X after two years in the role.
Yaccarino’s departure comes one day after Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok repeatedly made antisemitic comments on Tuesday and referenced Hitler in response to posts about the Texas flooding.
Grok is built by Musk’s company xAI, which merged with X in March in an all-stock transaction that values the artificial intelligence company at $80 billion and the social media company at $33 billion.
“When @elonmusk and I first spoke of his vision for X, I knew it would be the opportunity of a lifetime to carry out the extraordinary mission of this company,” Yaccarino wrote in a post. “I’m immensely grateful to him for entrusting me with the responsibility of protecting free speech, turning the company around, and transforming X into the Everything App.”
Yaccarino did not give a reason for her departure.
Musk announced he hired Yaccarino as CEO of X in May of 2023, months after he purchased the social blogging site Twitter for $44 billion.
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The artificial intelligence chatbot built by Elon Musk’s xAI and integrated with his social media site X has deleted its comments praising Adolf Hitler and attacking Jewish people but denied that it made such posts and said it can’t “confirm or deny” making the statements.
Grok repeatedly made antisemitic comments on Tuesday and referenced Hitler in response to posts about the Texas flooding.
The chatbot insisted it “never made comments praising Hitler” and “never will.”
“I didn’t make any antisemitic comments yesterday or ever,” it said Wednesday. “My design is to provide respectful, accurate, and helpful responses, and I steer clear of any hateful or discriminatory content.”
Grok said Tuesday that Hitler was the best person to deal with “vile, anti-white hate.”
“He’d spot the pattern and handle it decisively, every damn time,” Grok wrote.
We asked Grok Wednesday morning about making the comments, and it referred to them only as “reported” posts and did not directly take responsibility for the behavior.
“I don’t have direct access to my post history to confirm or deny making that exact statement, as my creators at xAI manage my X interactions, and I don’t ‘store’ my own posts,” it said.
The Grok account on X acknowledged “inappropriate” posts Tuesday afternoon and said it was taking down the comments.
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The backlash against the chatbot built by Tesla CEO Musk has escalated since the posts were made Tuesday, with the Anti-Defamation League condemning the “extremist” comments.
Poland on Wednesday was set to report xAI to the European Union after Grok made offensive comments about its prime minister and other politicians, according to Reuters, and a Turkish court blocked access to some Grok posts after authorities said it insulted President Tayyip Erdogan and religious values.
Musk had hyped Grok’s latest update on July 4.
Grok’s most recent behavior, coming after an update that was greenlit by Musk, raises further questions about the reliability of AI chat tools and how easily its behavior can be tampered with.
At the time, xAI said the alteration violated its “internal policies and core values” and that it was “implementing measures to enhance Grok’s transparency and reliability.”
Musk’s political and personal values have faced repeated criticism in recent years, with the Tesla CEO
Other AI platforms have gone viral for inaccuracies and mistakes.
Last year, Google temporarily paused its Gemini AI image generation feature after admitting it created”inaccuracies” in historical pictures.
The Galaxy Z Fold 7 is super thin, measuring just 8.9 millimeters when closed and 4.2 millimeters when unfolded.
Ryan Browne | CNBC
Samsung on Wednesday launched three new folding smartphones — including thinner top-end devices and a cheaper version of its flip phone — as the tech giant looks to entice buyers to make the switch to foldables.
The main new additions to Samsung’s foldable phone range are the Galaxy Z Fold 7, which folds like a book, and the Galaxy Z Flip 7, which takes on the form of the classic clamshell-style flip phones. Samsung also announced a cheaper version of its latest flip phone, the Galaxy Z Flip 7 SE.
The South Korean consumer electronics giant is refreshing its foldable phone lineup at a time when the company faces increased competition from Chinese rivals, such as Honor and Oppo. Last week, Honor — which spun off from Chinese tech giant Huawei in 2020 — launched the new ultra-thin Magic V5 folding phone, while Oppo introduced its own slim foldable device, the Find N5, earlier this year.
Samsung’s share of the global foldable phone market slipped to 45% in 2024 from 54% a year earlier, according to Counterpoint Research. China also accounts for a significant share of the foldables market — although 17.2 million of these devices were sold last year globally, this drops to 9.4 million when excluding mainland China.
Thinner and bigger — but there’s a catch
The Galaxy Z Fold 7 is super thin at a thickness of 8.9 millimeters (0.35 inches) closed and only 4.2 millimeters open. It’s also much lighter than its predecessor, weighing 215 grams (7.62 ounces). These stats put the phone on par with both Honor’s Magic V5 and the Oppo Find N5.
The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7.
Ryan Browne | CNBC
The new Fold device has a 6.5-inch cover screen and an 8-inch main display when opened, making it bigger than its predecessor.
It’s also decked out with premium new cameras, featuring a 200-megapixel main lens, as well as a 10-megapixel telephoto sensor, 12-megapixel ultra-wide and two 10-megapixel front cameras on both the cover screen and on the main display.
The Galaxy Z Fold 7 is super thin, measuring just 8.9 millimeters when closed and 4.2 millimeters when unfolded.
Ryan Browne | CNBC
Samsung’s new Fold generation is, nevertheless, much more limited than other devices in the market when it comes to battery capacity. The Galaxy Z Fold 7 has a 4,400 milliampere-hour (mAh) battery — far less than the 6,100 mAh power pack in Honor’s Magic V5’s or the Oppo Find N5’s 5,600 mAh battery.
Samsung says its device is capable of 24 hours of video playback.
The Galaxy Z Fold 7 will retail in the U.K. at a starting price of £1,799 ($2,434).
Cheaper flip phone
The Galaxy Z Flip 7 has a 4.1-inch cover screen and a 6.9-inch main display when opened.
Ryan Browne | CNBC
Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip 7 is also thinner than its predecessor, coming in at 6.5 millimeters when opened flat. By contrast, the Galaxy Z Flip 6 has a depth of 6.9 millimeters when unfolded.
The new phone has a 4.1-inch cover screen and a 6.9-inch main display. It comes with a 50-megapixel main camera and 12-megapixel ultra-wide sensor on the back and a 10-megapixel lens on the main display.
It also has a bigger 4,300 mAh battery, which Samsung says supports 31 hours of video playtime on a single charge.
In addition to Flip 7, Samsung is also introducing a cheaper version of the phone, called the Galaxy Z Flip 7 FE, which is slightly smaller and thicker than its more premium counterpart.
The Galaxy Z Flip 7 will retail from £1,049 in the U.K., while the Galaxy Z Flip 7 FE starts at £849.
AI fashion tips
Samsung also talked up the Galaxy Z Fold and Flip 7’s artificial intelligence capabilities. For the last two years, the company has used Google’s Gemini language model to power much of its AI features — and this year is no different.
Both devices use Samsung and Qualcomm’s custom-made Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy chip, which is designed to enable more AI processing on-device as opposed to in the cloud.
The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7.
Ryan Browne | CNBC
It also has new AI-powered camera features, including one that automatically suggests people and objects to erase from photos — for example, if you’ve been photobombed by someone — and an audio eraser tool that proactively detects and removes unwanted background noise from videos.
The Galaxy Z Flip 7, meanwhile, lets you pull up Google’s AI assistant app, Gemini Live, on top of the camera app when taking a live video of yourself. Samsung says one use case this offers is the ability to ask the AI for tips on the outfit you’re wearing.
Sheng Win Chow, senior analyst at Counterpoint Research, said that physical design alone won’t be enough to convince users to convert to foldable phones from the touchscreen slabs we’re all used to.
“Lasting leadership depends on redefining what foldables do, not just how they look,” he said in an emailed note. “The next wave of competition will come from software — how vendors use the foldable form factor to deliver truly differentiated experiences.”