Authours: by Raphaël Deberdt, Philippe Le Billon
The electrification of our livelihoods, in particular the development of electric vehicles, will require massive amounts of minerals including nickel, cobalt and manganese, which are all found in huge quantities on the seafloor. Deep-seabed mining (DSM) could not only help scale up the supply of minerals needed for phasing out of fossil fuels but also prevent some of the destructive fallout of future land-based mining.