ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

“The Mines of Neptune”: Deep Seabed Mining, Ocean Territorialization, and the Undersea as Underground (1957-1982)

• In Event: Governing the Seas: Ocean Science, International Law, and the Contested Politics of the Post-War Ocean (2 of 2)

English Abstract

Extractive multinationals and the governments and venture capitalists supporting them have scripted deep-sea minerals within frameworks of “green” extractivism – a label that situates the deep seabed beyond national jurisdiction within an emergent (largely terrestrial) planetary landscape of “critical minerals” development. Yet despite the seemingly natural alliance between ocean mining and land mining, this alignment was produced in a particular historical moment, when mining majors became key voices during the third United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (1973-1982). Amid a crowded field of potential modes for territorializing and governing the oceans and their resources, mining firms’ visions for prospecting ocean space expanded upon oil majors’ earlier articulation of the “continental shelf” to transpose terrestrial spatial fixes for land-miners’ problems of claim-jumping, resource tenure, and securing speculative capital, to the seabed. Exploration zones of fixed area and often-discontinuous borders became embedded in ocean law, mirroring the mid-1970s construction of exclusive economic zones (EEZs) as spatial fixes for managing oceanic resource futures.

This paper interrogates how this happened, highlighting the epistemic consequences of understanding the ocean as a natural extension of land, including the specific “architectures of territory” that this prolongation engendered. I explore contests and affirmations of the deep-sea as “underground” both within applied ocean science, where technologists viewed mining as a metaphor unfit for the novel design challenges of engineering mineral recovery equipment suited to scraping or vacuuming the surficial sediments of the abyssal plain, and within oceanic governance, where politicians read those challenges as opportunities to sever the future management of shared ocean space from terrestrial concepts of property tenure.

Author

• Jonathan Galka, National University of Singapore