Clean Energy Requires Rare Metals. Should We Mine the Ocean Floor to Get Them?

By Leta Dickinson
Our need for metals runs deep. How deep, you might ask? Why, up to 16,000 feet deep, in the form of potato-sized lumps of metal lying on the seafloor in some of the deepest parts of the oceans. We’ve been making sci-fi movies and writing books about it for decades, but commercial deep-sea mining might soon become…