Deep-sea mining is increasingly promoted as a means of securing the critical minerals needed for the green transition. Building on technologies developed in the offshore oil and gas industry, it extends extractive ambitions thousands of meters below the ocean surface. Yet the deep sea remains poorly understood, and plans to mine it have sparked scientific, political, and environmental controversies.
Drawing on ethnographic research conducted since late 2023, this presentation examines how deep-sea mining is advancing and being contested across different political contexts. Focusing on Norway’s mining plans, US ambitions to secure seabed minerals, and opposition in American Samoa, it explores the tensions between geopolitical competition, scientific uncertainty, and ancestral relations to the deep ocean. The controversy surrounding the discovery of so-called dark oxygen further illustrates how scientific knowledge becomes entangled in struggles over extraction.
Bringing these cases together, the presentation examines deep-sea mining as a project of frontier-making, asking whose knowledge and relationships with the ocean count when the seabed is transformed into a mineral resource.
Rasmus Rodineliussen is a social anthropologist and postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Arts and Ideas at the University of Oslo. His work explores human relationships with marine environments, from waste and pollution to deep-sea resource extraction. He is the author of Underwater Worlds: An Ethnography of Waste, Pollution, and Marine Life (2024) and currently researches competing perspectives on deep-sea mining within the “Visualizing the Deep Sea in the Age of Climate Change” project.
