December 3, 2021
sprep-pa
“See this?” Paul Lynch, an affable middle-aged lawyer, asks the schoolkids gathered around him. He holds up a baseball-sized rock—a polymetallic nodule, so called because it contains multiple metals, among them cobalt, copper, manganese, nickel, and rare earth elements. The nodule formed about five kilometers below the surface of the sea, where the pressure is intense enough to crack steel.
