The 80 or so countries with realistic hopes of being able to substantiate a claim are not expecting new fishing rights. Their designs are chiefly on minerals. Many people have for years believed that the seabed was paved with gold, and with some reason. It has long been known that roughly a quarter of the ocean floor is strewn with “manganese nodules”, usually about the size of an apple, which contain not just manganese but also cobalt, copper and nickel. When the law of the sea was being debated in the 1970s, these nodules aroused enormous excitement. It subsided, though, when it became clear that the UN’s proposed arrangements for licensing mining in the deep sea would involve the sharing of technical information with a new International Seabed Authority. America, whose companies were leaders in the field, did not relish parting with its technical secrets and turned against the UN’s planned convention, which it has yet to ratify. Investment in deep-sea mineral extraction came to a halt.

Most Americans dropped their opposition to the convention after its provisions on deep-sea mining were changed in 1994. Even George Bush junior eventually came round to it and American ratification now seems only a matter of time. The United States, however, was not the only obstacle to digging and dredging in the deep. Gathering the nodules was, and is, technically difficult, chiefly because most of them lie in 4km of water, and it was not popular with environmentalists, either, since the necessary dredging stirs up quantities of sediment that kills everything nearby.

... contd.