In Kingston, Jamaica, by secret ballot, an election was held earlier this month. The lands whose governance was at stake are vaster than any nation, and it’s possible the consequences of the vote will be felt for eons. More than half of the world’s ocean floor is under the jurisdiction of an intergovernmental body called the International Seabed Authority, or ISA. Its members have spent the last three decades in deliberations with a single purpose: crafting an international legal regime for a field of commercial activity that does not yet exist. Their mandate is to determine how — and whether — to allow the nations of the Earth to mine the sea.
The cold floor of the deep ocean is a place human beings know very little about. One thing we do know is that things there happen extremely slowly. The mercurial forces that condition life for the creatures of the Earth’s surface — sunlight, winds, the seasons, the weather — have little reach into the deep-sea ecosystem. When scientists visit, their machines’ tracks in the sediment are still visible a quarter-century later. The world’s oldest living organisms rely on this stability to make their home here, sheltered in darkness under the ocean’s colossal weight.
