Another company, Nautilus Minerals, is working in the territorial waters of Papua New Guinea to shatter a field of underwater hot springs lined with precious metals, while Japan and South Korea have embarked on national projects to exploit their own offshore deposits. In 2018, those ships extracted 1.4 million carats from the coastal waters of Namibia in 2019, De Beers commissioned a new ship that will scrape the bottom twice as quickly as any other vessel.

On the west coast of Africa, the De Beers Group is using a fleet of specialized ships to drag machinery across the seabed in search of diamonds.

Today, many of the largest mineral corporations in the world have launched underwater mining programs. For more than a century, oceanographers continued to identify new minerals on the seafloor-copper, nickel, silver, platinum, gold, and even gemstones-while mining companies searched for a practical way to dig them up. Five years later, another ship found similar nuggets at the bottom of the Atlantic, and two years after that, it discovered a field of the same objects in the Pacific. Scientists have documented their deposits since at least 1868, when a dredging ship pulled a chunk of iron ore from the seabed north of Russia. These peaks and valleys are laced with most of the same minerals found on land. To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.

Deep sea dredging mining