Introduction

T

he polymetallic nodule is a knobbly, spherical mass made of layers of minerals that accumulate around a small core such as pieces of shell or shark tooth (ISA n.d.). These minerals include high concentrations of manganese, nickel, copper, cobalt, zinc, and smaller amounts of molybdenum, titanium, lithium, and rare earth minerals (Kuhn et al., 2017; Wegorzewski et al., 2015). Notably, “[n]odule growth is one of the slowest of all geological phenomena – in the order of a centimetre over several million years” (ISA, n.d.:  2). Described as potato-sized, nodules are found half submerged in oceanic abyssal plains around the globe, and concentrated in certain fields about 5 to 6 km below the water’s surface (Rona, 2003; Wegorzewski et al., 2015).

Extractive interest in the once-remote polymetallic nodules has grown rapidly in an era of constrained resources where global narratives frame shallower mineral deposits as increasingly depleted and heightened political tensions as making reliance on ‘critical mineral’ imports less desirable. However, this is not simply a case of running out of deposits. As geographer Julie Klinger (2018) points out, rare earths are not even rare (nor ‘earth’ for that matter) but their real prevalence, as with other minerals, is obscured by racial capitalist, securitization, and crisis discourses that construct which landscapes are made available for extraction and exploitation over others. Today, the sheer number of companies negotiating seabed exploration rights is fast re-establishing a deep sea mining industry once derided as completely unfeasible (Steinberg, 2001), even where the technologies required to mine such depths have still not been proven workable. For deep sea mining, exploration prefigures exploitation. On land, mining exploration requires further feasibility studies and approvals prior to exploitation, but the International Seabed Authority (ISA) is only now developing regulations to include similar steps. Instead, much is written about proposed environmental benefits in lieu of continuing damaging extractive practices back on land, just as counter arguments are put forward regarding the extreme vulnerability of deep sea environments. This polarity was noted in a recent investigative piece in The Atlantic that memorably queried “why the United Nations is preparing to mobilize the largest mining operation in the history of the world” (Hylton, 2020: n.p.).

This short essay focuses on how private companies and state agencies – enabled by the United Nations (UN) and regulatory organizations like ISA – are carefully constructing images of themselves, their activities, and the seabed itself to influence public conceptions of deep sea mining. It is situated in the context of the UN’s Decade of Ocean Science, an attempt to ‘unlock’ an equitable and sustainable ocean in the face of crises such as the overexploitation of resources. The Decade has multiple strands dedicated to understanding the science of the deep seabed. In this piece we focus on an overlooked but crucial question to understanding how deep sea mining is justified, rationalized and made acceptable. We examine how image-making practices for the promotion of deep sea mining are socio-political practices embedded in a long architectural lineage of ‘worlding’, which have consistently failed to imagine future possibilities beyond globalized capital. 

Central to these endeavors is operationalizing distance, where representations of the remote seabed take the place of first-hand experience for much of the world. We therefore make use of critical image-making to re-present existing seabed speculations, hoping to reveal counter-narratives where other images elide. We credit feminist theorist Karen Barad for this recombinatory methodology of ‘thinking’ entities together and ‘through’ each other. Critical image-making is visual scholarship that resists canonical readings and, as Barad (2007: 90-91) notes, seeks “making a difference in the world…We do not uncover preexisting facts about independently existing things as they exist frozen in time like little statues positioned in the world. Rather, we learn about phenomena – about specific material configurations of the world’s becoming.” 

Subsidiaries All the Way Down 

Understanding how deep sea mining operators construct public-facing imagery requires unraveling labyrinthine networks of contracts and companies. ISA, a governing body established by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) for resource related activities in the seabed beyond national jurisdictions, has 11 active contracts for polymetallic nodule exploration (ISA, 2022c), which are awarded to private or state-owned enterprises but must also be sponsored by a State that is Party to UNCLOS (Oyarce, 2018). 

To highlight these complicated relationships, two of the eleven current contractors  – Nauru Ocean Resources Inc. (NORI) and Tonga Offshore Mining Limited (TOML) – are subsidiaries that were purchased by The Metals Company, a Canadian company explicitly focused on deep sea mining. The Metals Company also formed an agreement with contractor Marawa Research and Exploration Ltd and its sponsoring State the Republic of Kiribati, providing exclusive exploration rights within the CCZ (The Metals Company, 2021). NORI, TOML and Marawa are sponsored by Nauru, Tonga, and Kiribati respectively; and each allocated a reserved area within the CCZ for developing states. 

In this case, private contractor relationships with so-called developing states are viewed by ISA as an ideal solution: enabling nations without financial resources to access the deep sea mining industry, and demonstrating ISA’s system provides “sufficient incentives and security of tenure to enable the private sector to invest in developing the common heritage of mankind” (sic, Secretary General of the ISA in 2011, quoted by The Metals Company, 2020: n.p.). International law expert Edwin Egede (2018) reminds us there is no definition of a ‘developing state’ and its designation is typically politically directed. This is troubling where UNCLOS provides an obligation to protect marine environments but its dispute resolution chamber affords some relaxation for those states to use a precautionary approach towards deep sea mining. This incentivizes ‘treaty-gaming’ and erodes expectations for vulnerable ocean ecosystems. For ISA, monetary gain from deep sea mining is not key to ensuring the common heritage of the seabed is equally shared. However, it is possible to see the deeply unequal power relationships that derive from ‘big’ business, Global North investment to enable Global South states access to their own resources. Indeed, less critically focused on the power asymmetries, ISA emphasizes the role seabed minerals will play in any large-scale transition to renewables and its capacity to collectively benefit humanity: “To achieve the objective of a future society based on renewable energy and technology, it will be critical to find new sources of reliable, clean and ethically sourced mineral resources” (ISA, 2022b: n.p.). The implication is this administering authority already views deep sea mining as reliable, clean and of course, ethically sourced.  

Becoming a Lesser Evil  

The idea of deep sea exploitation as an environmentally sustainable alternative to terrestrial mining – an ethical mining industry – has spread steadily. As private entities undertake their programs of exploratory work, some have also begun brand identity establishment, developing a public presence through websites, social media accounts, and press releases. Using marketing materials as texts, the following sections consider how they rely on the notion of ‘blind fields’ to control viewer perceptions both of deep sea mining and the seabed itself, and interrogate their place within a lineage of architectural visualizations and developer-driven futures. 

Henri Lefebvre (2003 [1970]: 23) argued a “blind field” was not simply a moment of unconscious blindness or selective focus but rather, an ideological ‘not-seeing’ that drives ‘not-knowing’. He claimed these practices were deliberately constructed via interwoven psychological, physical, and social means; and that a reluctance to examine their logics of power, commodification, and industrial practices meant such relations would remain murky. To present an analysis of deep sea marketing texts, we compiled a database of website launch pages (that is, the home page) from each company, including parents and subsidiaries, where they exist. This allowed us to undertake a thematic analysis of the visual and textual elements of each launch page.  

What emerges is the visualization of emptiness, as seen in Figure 1: the use of images presenting stark and largely unpeopled views of ocean horizons meeting the sky, underwater photos and illustrations without inhabitants, and most notably the recurring image of fields of polymetallic nodules on the seabed. These images generally have a low-resolution quality to them, with distance reinforced through the fade into darkness beyond the light of the robot surveying them. They convey deep sea mining as an ethical alternative to land-based mining by portraying polymetallic nodules as isolated, and therefore unattached to questions of biodiversity and marine health. 

We have argued previously that oceans are more often conceived remotely through their representations only, and “made to seem redundant in the co-constitution of human, non-human and non-lively relationships across the globe” (Edwards, 2019: 313). Similarly, the seabed is a space constructed as a place sans liveliness, where polymetallic nodules exist disconnected from human and/or nonhuman relationships. Representations, and the narratives they foster, matter: as ethnographer Sophie Chao and Pasifika scholar Dion Enari (2021: 39) argue, “[s]tories are not just cultural artefacts – they are also political tools that can compel readers and auditors to situate the world, and themselves within it, otherwise.” Furthermore, the work of Chao and Enari – and acknowledging Pacific cosmologies more broadly – reveal the ocean and liveliness can never be separated (see Figure 2); and that their relations are critical in constructing futures from both the present and past. In the words of Tongan and Fijian writer and anthropologist Epeli Hau’ofa, “We cannot read our histories without knowing how to read our landscapes (and seascapes)” (Chao and Enari, 2021: 41).  

Deep sea representations that emphasize remoteness and situate nodule fields as lifeless help their extraction to read as friendly or, at least, friendlier to the environment. In particular, they objectify the polymetallic nodule as simply a resource waiting to be used – “a battery in a rock” (The Metals Company, 2021b). That rhetoric is also supported by their more favorable comparison to terrestrial mining: “[w]hen metals come from land, often rainforests have to be cleared, mountains flattened, communities displaced” (GSR, 2022). Sadly, such arguments are not unexpected. Geographers, science and technology theorists, and urbanists like Donald McNeill (2022), Jathan Sadowski (2020), Sarah Knuth (2015), and Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin (2001) have all asserted remote environments around the globe are increasingly reconfigured as property – and thus available to extract value from – through new arrangements of financialization and design: 

"They might not be making more land, but they are certainly making more space (Lefebvre, 1991). Arguably, they’re now making more of it, more quickly, in more ways, while also deriving more types of value from it." (Sadowski, 2021: 448)

Media theorist Shannon Mattern (2021) also points to the mobilization of ‘emptiness’ in supporting enclosure and dispossession as an ongoing projection of colonial settler traditions: the deliberate attempt to obfuscate whole terrains as ‘blank’ space for the taking. Oceanic spaces have, in particular, long been operationalised in these ways, where the “idealization of the deep sea as a great void of distance” (Steinberg, 2001: 163) makes its wholesale appropriation possible. Our analysis of deep sea mining marketing materials likewise points to both the control of public understanding and facilitation of seabed extraction through careful representations of emptiness at a distance. 

Developing Imagery and Deep Sea Development 

We argue there is intent behind these framings. From their own launch pages, many deep sea mining proposals draw on image-making techniques like 3D-rendered visualizations and glossy real estate pitches common to urban developments across the planet. The most widely disseminated ‘hero image’ (architectural slang describing a high-impact representation of any future project) from our own website survey purports to be a view of the seabed with vague lumps gently settled in the abyssal plains: definitively murky, empty, and without life. Instead, this image is actually a digitally generated field of polymetallic nodules in a notional seabed for The Metals Company website launch video: a 3D-rendered animation of the company’s vision available via their investor online media portal (The Metals Company, 2022). Though modeled on widely-used footage taken by a GEOMAR diving robot in 2015 (Heffernan, 2019), the animation’s representation of this space erases any evidence of ‘marine snow’ (decomposing and dead matter falling to the seabed, and a food source for many organisms), other life, and submergence of the polymetallic nodules within the seabed sediment itself. 

The animation also makes use of a god-like aerial perspective, bright horizons, dramatic landscape ‘flythroughs’, driverless car and future undersea technologies, polymetallic nodules divorced from living systems, and a noticeable lack of human presence to promote a clean, innovative and environmentally beneficial mining operation. These representations of deep sea mining also bear striking resemblance to the spectacle of commercial development images rendered today. Such image-making techniques were once the radical remit of neo-avant-garde architects and artists of the 1960s and 1970s (Alexander and Morgan, 2017). Now, however, the ubiquitous use of hyperreal visualizations and cheap image-editing software for developer-driven proposals dependent on globalized capital create a mode of ‘worlding’ (McCann et al., 2013; Spivak, 2012) that – whether architectural, urban, or as we would suggest, abyssal – is all future-fetish and yet always resistant to change or possibility, as illustrated in Figure 3. 

The leap from architectural to ‘abyssal’ visualizations may not seem so random if we consider a leading proponent in both mega-project proposals and marine technology marketing imagery is multimillionaire architect Bjarke Ingels. Ingels’ design firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) has more recently driven the use of bright and carefree – ‘pragmatic utopian’ (Ingels et al., 2009) – representations for architectural and urban development projects around the world. It should be noted that BIG have also designed the processing facility, nodule-collecting submersibles, and support vessels for The Metals Company’s proposed deep sea mining operations (Aouf, 2021). Indeed, urban researcher Elizabeth Yarina critiques Ingels’ representational methods as part of a broader concern for speculative practices that serve the agenda of globalizing capital rather than the creation and care of inhabitable environments, stating: “[a]rchitectural labor manufactures distinct designs and spaces that create one-off value in physical places, value that then can be extracted by developers through real estate transactions” (2017: 245). In each of these examples, obfuscation of vibrant and vulnerable living spaces depends on work done by geographical distance, restricting actual experience to consumption via curated images only. 

Geographer Bruce Braun identifies the deliberate framing of wilderness environments as ‘remote’ – even though co-opted by extraction and exploitation – as “a particular spatialisation of nature” (2005: 641, original emphasis). Other scholars claim this operationalizes the entire planet in the interests of transnational capital accumulation: that is, urbanizing development can be considered an always-becoming and uncontrolled everywhere (Brenner and Schmid, 2011; Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2014; Pinder, 2015). 

Conclusion

This short essay underscores how pervasively visual and conceptual constructions take the place of first-hand experience of the deep sea across the world, and identifies where abyssal visualizations are used strategically to create images aimed at influencing broader public conceptions of deep sea mining. The success of emergent miners like The Metals Company in positioning their proposed actions as environmentally friendly relies on consumer – and, worryingly, regulator – perceptions of the seabed and polymetallic nodules as disconnected from ocean flows, planetary networks of life, and ever-extending processes of urbanization: “...these nodules lie unattached to the abyssal seafloor and are almost entirely composed of usable materials” (The Metals Company, 2021b: n.p.). 

Representations like these deploy Lefebvre’s ‘blind fields’ to control viewer perceptions of both deep sea mining and the seabed itself. They also reveal an all-too-frequent detachment of images of extraction from their methods of production in amongst their becoming-as representations – and yet, these futures can be constructed differently. We conclude with a reminder that the technologies of mining media and, even more significantly, modes of deliberate distancing themselves constitute socio-political practices that demand ongoing attention.

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Amelia Hine is an Associate Research Fellow in the School of Geography and Sustainable Communities at the University of Wollongong. Her research focuses on materialities of mining and energy transitions and the role of nonhuman actors in industrial landscape planning. 

Charity Edwards is an architect, urban researcher and lecturer at Monash University’s Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture. Her research highlights the impacts of urbanization in remote and offworld environments, and she is also co-founder of The Afterlives of Cities research collective, which brings together expertise in architecture, digital fabrication, astrophysics, and speculative fiction to recover futures in space.