Four miles beneath the surface of the central Pacific Ocean lies a shadowy world where sunlight never reaches and water temperatures hover just above freezing. Sprawled across thousands of square miles of the abyssal plain are trillions of dark, potato-sized rocks known as polymetallic nodules. For decades, these deep-sea deposits have been the subject of intense international debate. Today, that debate has entered an unprecedented chapter as global regulators finalize the first binding rules for commercial ocean floor extraction.
Following marathon negotiation sessions in
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