The island still collects no income tax, and abandoned mansions litter the coast. Having depleted their previous revenue streams, the Nauruan government is looking for a new way to make money—and, for sponsoring states, deep sea mining could mean quite a bit of money. But it also entails a certain amount of risk. The whole point of requiring a sponsoring state, rather than just allowing private companies to mine the sea at will, is that the state will be held co-responsible for any potential environmental damages, which could be staggering. Back when the Law of the Sea was first written, Matt Gianni says, “they thought these nodules were a renewable resource. That they would form as quickly or even more quickly than you can find them. A bit like Thomas Huxley, back in the 1800s, saying it’s impossible to overfish the ocean.”

Technically, the nodules are a renewable resource, but they take an incomprehensible amount of time to form. Ocean currents carry dissolved metals across the abyssal zone until they collect around a nucleus—a shark’s tooth, for example, or a fragment of whale bone—and coagulate in concentric circles. Dense, black rock slowly begins to appear. The nodules grow only a few centimeters every million years, and no one is totally sure how they remain perched atop the seabed, unobscured by falling sediment, which accretes much faster. Geologists suspect it has to do with the feeding patterns of starfish.