The nodules have been rising, in utter blackness and near-total silence, for tens of millions of years. Each 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. In 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 flooring.

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 web alongside the ocean backside, hauled it up, and dumped the dripping sediment onto the wood deck. As the expedition’s scientists, in lengthy trousers and shirtsleeves, eagerly sifted via the mud and muck, they famous the numerous “peculiar black oval bodies” that they quickly decided had been concretions of priceless minerals. A captivating discovery, however it might be nearly 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 Resources 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 hundreds of years. Mining the nodules, he speculated, “could serve to remove one of the historic causes of war between nations, supplies of raw materials for expanding populations. Of course it might produce the opposite effect also, that of fomenting inane squabbles over who owns which areas of the ocean floor.”

In an period when inhabitants progress and an embryonic environmental motion had been fueling considerations about pure assets, seabed mining immediately obtained sizzling. Throughout the Nineteen Seventies, governments and personal firms rushed to develop ships and rigs to drag up nodules. There was a lot hype that in 1972, it appeared fully believable when billionaire Howard Hughes introduced that he was dispatching a custom-built ship into the Pacific to seek for nodules. (In reality, the CIA had recruited Hughes to offer cowl for the ship’s Bond-esque mission: to covertly retrieve a sunken Soviet submarine.) But none of the particular sea miners managed to give you a system that might 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 complex motors, ships may float above exactly chosen factors on the seafloor. Remotely operated underwater autos grew extra succesful and dove deeper. The nodules now gave the impression to be inside attain, simply for the time being when booming economies similar to China’s had been ravenous for metals.

Barron noticed the potential bonanza many years 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 want to be a dairy farmer, but I loved dairy farm life,” he says. “I loved driving tractors and harvesters.” He left residence to go to a regional college and began his first firm, a loan-refinancing operation, whereas nonetheless a scholar. After graduating, he moved to Brisbane “to discover the big, wide world.” Over the years, he has been concerned in journal publishing, advert software program, and traditional automotive 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 stuffed with 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 somewhat what appeared like a better goal: underwater formations known as seafloor large sulfides, that are wealthy in copper and different metals. The firm struck a take care of the federal government of Papua New Guinea to mine sulfides off the nation’s coast. (Under worldwide regulation, international locations can do mainly no matter they need inside their Economic Exclusion Zones, which prolong 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.