The Clause That Started the Clock
On 25 June 2021 Nauru sent a letter to the International Seabed Authority and triggered a treaty clause nobody had ever used. It gave the regulator of the entire deep ocean floor two years to finish its rulebook, and the country that started the clock is the one that has already been mined flat.
Stand on Command Ridge, sixty-five metres up, and you can see almost the whole of Nauru. The coastal strip is a ribbon a few hundred metres wide with the houses, the road, the school and the church on it. Everything inside that ribbon is Topside: roughly four-fifths of the country, dug out over a century and left as a field of limestone pinnacles, most a few metres high and the tallest close to fifteen, with the pits between them where the phosphate used to be. You cannot farm it, build on it or easily walk across it. Nauru is the only country on earth that has been substantially consumed as a raw material, and the people who live on the rim of it know precisely what an extractive industry looks like when the ore runs out.
Which is what makes the letter of 25 June 2021 worth reading carefully. On that date Nauru wrote to the President of the Council of the International Seabed Authority in Kingston, Jamaica, to say that a company it sponsors intended to apply for a licence to mine the deep ocean floor, and to invoke a clause of the law of the sea that had never been used. The effect of the clause was to give the Authority two years to finish the mining regulations it had been drafting since 2014. If it did not, it would have to consider the application anyway, under whatever rules happened to exist. A country of about twelve thousand people had put the regulator of nearly half the planet's surface on a timer.
What the letter actually did
The mechanism is paragraph 15 of Section 1 of the Annex to the 1994 agreement on implementing Part XI of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. It was written as a safeguard for contractors: a state whose sponsored operator is ready to mine can notify the Council, and the Authority then has two years to adopt the necessary rules. If the deadline passes with the rules incomplete, the Council must nonetheless consider the plan of work and may approve it provisionally on the basis of the treaty itself and whatever regulations have been adopted. It had sat unused for twenty-seven years because until 2021 nobody claimed to be ready. Nauru's notification set the expiry at 9 July 2023, and every deep-sea mining negotiation since has been conducted against that date.
Why a company needed Nauru at all
The seabed beyond national jurisdiction is legally "the common heritage of mankind" — nobody's property, administered on behalf of everyone by the Authority. A private company cannot hold a contract there in its own right. It must be sponsored by a state party, which takes on the obligation to supervise it. Nauru Ocean Resources Inc has held an exploration block in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, an abyssal plain between Mexico and Hawaii four to five and a half kilometres deep, since 2011; it is a subsidiary of a Canadian firm, The Metals Company, which listed on Nasdaq later in 2021. The nodules lying loose on that seabed contain nickel, cobalt, copper and manganese. The reason a Vancouver company operates through a Pacific micro-state is not tax. It is that the treaty requires a sponsor, and small island developing states get preferential access to reserved blocks under the same rules.
Nauru did not stumble into this. In 2010 it asked the Authority to seek an advisory opinion on how far a sponsoring state could be held liable for its contractor, and the tribunal in Hamburg answered in February 2011 that the duty was one of due diligence rather than guarantee. That ruling is what made it safe for a country this size to sponsor anyone.
The argument Nauru makes
It is not an unserious one, and it is usually reported without being stated. Nauru's position is that the common heritage of mankind was written into the treaty precisely so that developing states without continental shelves or mineral deposits would receive a share of seabed wealth through the Authority's benefit-sharing arrangements — and that a regulator which never finishes its rulebook converts that promise into a permanent nothing. Its officials have pointed out that the alternative supply of the same metals comes from nickel laterite in Indonesia and cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with consequences borne by other people's forests and other people's children. And they have the phosphate history to point at: an industry that ran from 1907, was bought out by the new republic in 1970 for A$21 million, funded a sovereign trust valued at over a billion Australian dollars at its peak in the early 1990s, and was gone within a decade of that peak after a run of catastrophic investments. Australia paid A$107 million in a 1993 settlement of the case Nauru had brought at the International Court of Justice over the pre-independence damage, with A$12 million each from Britain and New Zealand. It did not rebuild the island and it was never going to.
The argument its neighbours make
The strongest opposition to Nauru's move came from the Pacific. Palau and Fiji launched an alliance calling for a moratorium at the UN Ocean Conference in Lisbon in June 2022, and Samoa, Vanuatu, Tuvalu and the Federated States of Micronesia have all backed a pause; the number of states supporting some form of moratorium or precautionary halt has since passed thirty. Their case is that nobody knows what is down there. The abyssal plain is among the least surveyed environments on earth, the nodules themselves are habitat that took millions of years to form, and the one long-running disturbance experiment — DISCOL, ploughed into the Peru Basin in 1989 — showed tracks still visible and communities still not recovered when scientists returned twenty-six years later. Nauru's answer has been that a moratorium of indefinite length is a decision too, and one made by countries that already have their minerals.
The deadline expired, and then the sponsor stopped mattering
9 July 2023 arrived with no mining code adopted. The Council did not approve anything; it agreed a roadmap aiming at 2025, undertook to consider any application that arrived, and carried on drafting. No commercial exploitation licence has been issued under the treaty. Then, in April 2025, the arrangement Nauru had spent four years underwriting was routed around entirely: after a United States executive order on offshore critical minerals, The Metals Company's American subsidiary applied to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for permits under a 1980 domestic statute, the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act, which predates the convention and which the United States can use because it never ratified it. That route needs no sponsoring state at all. The Authority and a long list of governments objected that it cuts across the treaty; the company's position is that the treaty process had failed to deliver on its own timetable, which was the complaint Nauru had lodged in the first place.
What Nauru got out of four years as the world's most consequential sponsoring state is, so far, a rulebook that still is not finished and a partner that found a door on another continent. What it has not got is a royalty. The trust fund the phosphate money should have been is being attempted again — an intergenerational fund established in 2015 with contributions from Australia, Taiwan, New Zealand and the Asian Development Bank, on the explicit understanding that the first one was mismanaged into nothing. The pinnacles on Topside are unchanged. There is a rehabilitation corporation, there has been secondary mining of the residual phosphate since the mid-2000s, and a few hectares near the plateau edge have been levelled. Standing up there, the case for and against deep-sea mining is legible in the same view: a country that knows better than any other what happens when the deposit is exhausted, arguing that it should be allowed to be first to the next one.