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Seven new applications for approval of plans of work for exploration in the international Seabed Area were approved this morning by the Council of the International Seabed Authority as it nears conclusion of its work of the twentieth session in Kingston.

The Kingdom of Tonga this month became the first country in the world to put in place a law that manages seabed mineral activities within its national marine space and under its sponsorship in international waters.

As land-based minerals become depleted and prices rise, the search for new sources of supply is turning to the sea floor. This emerging industry, facilitated by advances in technology, poses a major threat to our oceans, which are already suffering from a number of pressures including overfishing, pollution, and the effects of climate change.

In 1959, John L. Mero of the Institute of Marine Resources at Berkeley published a 96-page document entitled “A Preliminary Report on the Economics of Mining and Processing Deep-sea Manganese Nodules”. In this landmark study, he discussed the geological and economic aspects of mining the seabed for polymetallicnodules found often partly or completely buried in seabed sediment. In the 19 years between 1965 and 1984, it is estimated that as much as $650 million was pumped into deep sea mining space. Unfortunately, vaulting ambition was not met by technological prowess and most of this investment had sunk without a trace within the space of two decades.

The potential for mining on the ocean floor is becoming more of a reality, with the Jamaica-headquartered International Seabed Authority holding its 19th session in July. Metal Bulletin's Andrea Hotter reports.

The International Seabed Authority and the Government of the Republic of Korea have signed a 15-year contract for exploration for polymetallic sulphides.‎

UK Seabed Resources, a subsidiary of the British arm of Lockheed Martin, hopes to extract so-called nodules - small lumps of rock - from the ocean floor.

The growing global demand for minerals and rare earth elements in the recent years, coupled with declining resources on land has got stakeholders interested from across the world to explore the lucrative mineral resources beneath the surface of the seas and invest in deep sea mining.

Nautilus was racing to be the first in the world to mine the sea floor. Now UK Seabed Resources, a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin, could take the lead. It has a licence to explore an area of the Pacific sea floor in international waters for minerals.

The Union ministry of earth sciences has asked Gujarat National Law University (GNLU) to prepare two draft laws that will lay the guidelines for deep sea mining in the Indian Ocean off India's territorial waters, and in Antarctic Ocean.

DeepGreen Metals recently acquired Tonga Offshore Mining Limited (TOML), giving the company exploration rights to a 75,000-square-kilometer block of seabed believed to contain some 756 million wet tons of polymetallic nodules.