The nodules have been rising, in utter blackness and near-total silence, for tens of millions of years. Every one began as a fragment of something else—a tiny fossil, a scrap of basalt, a shark’s tooth—that drifted all the way down to the plain on the very backside of the ocean. Within the lugubrious unfolding of geologic time, specks of waterborne nickel, copper, cobalt, and manganese slowly accreted onto them. By now, trillions lie half-buried within the sediment carpeting the ocean ground.

One March day in 1873, a few of these subaqueous artifacts had been dragged for the primary time into daylight. Sailors aboard the HMS Challenger, a former British warship retrofitted right into a floating analysis lab, dredged a internet alongside the ocean backside, hauled it up, and dumped the dripping sediment onto the wood deck. Because the expedition’s scientists, in lengthy trousers and shirtsleeves, eagerly sifted via the mud and muck, they famous the numerous “peculiar black oval our bodies” that they quickly decided had been concretions of priceless minerals. An interesting discovery, however it could be virtually a century earlier than the world started to dream of exploiting these stones.

In 1965, an American geologist revealed an influential e book known as The Mineral Sources of the Sea, which generously estimated that the nodules contained sufficient manganese, cobalt, nickel, and different metals to feed the world’s industrial wants for 1000’s of years. Mining the nodules, he speculated, “might serve to take away one of many historic causes of struggle between nations, provides of uncooked supplies for increasing populations. In fact it’d produce the alternative impact additionally, that of fomenting inane squabbles over who owns which areas of the ocean ground.”

In an period when inhabitants development and an embryonic environmental motion had been fueling considerations about pure sources, seabed mining instantly received scorching. All through the Seventies, governments and personal corporations rushed to develop ships and rigs to drag up nodules. There was a lot hype that in 1972, it appeared utterly believable when billionaire Howard Hughes introduced that he was dispatching a custom-built ship into the Pacific to seek for nodules. (In actual fact, the CIA had recruited Hughes to offer cowl for the ship’s Bond-esque mission: to covertly retrieve a sunken Soviet submarine.) However none of the particular sea miners managed to give you a system that would do the job at a value that made sense, and the fizz went out of the nascent trade.

By the flip of the twenty first century, advancing marine know-how made sea mining appear believable once more. With GPS and complicated motors, ships might float above exactly chosen factors on the seafloor. Remotely operated underwater autos grew extra succesful and dove deeper. The nodules now appeared to be inside attain, simply in the intervening time when booming economies similar to China’s had been ravenous for metals.

Barron noticed the potential bonanza a long time in the past. He grew up on a dairy farm, the youngest of 5 youngsters. (He now has 5 of his personal.) “I knew I didn’t need to be a dairy farmer, however I liked dairy farm life,” he says. “I liked driving tractors and harvesters.” He left house to go to a regional college and began his first firm, a loan-refinancing operation, whereas nonetheless a pupil. After graduating, he moved to Brisbane “to find the massive, extensive world.” Over time, he has been concerned in journal publishing, advert software program, and traditional automobile battery operations in China.

In 2001, a tennis buddy of Barron’s—a geologist, former prospector, and early web-hosting entrepreneur named David Heydon—pitched him on an organization he was spinning up, a sea-mining outfit known as Nautilus Minerals. Barron was fascinated to be taught that the oceans had been full of metals. He put a few of his personal cash into the enterprise and rounded up different buyers.

Nautilus wasn’t going after polymetallic nodules, however fairly what appeared like a neater goal: underwater formations known as seafloor huge sulfides, that are wealthy in copper and different metals. The corporate struck a take care of the federal government of Papua New Guinea to mine sulfides off the nation’s coast. (Underneath worldwide legislation, nations can do mainly no matter they need inside their Financial Exclusion Zones, which lengthen as much as 200 miles from their coastlines.) It sounded adequate to draw half a billion {dollars} from buyers, together with Papua New Guinea itself.