About 500 miles south of Hawaii and running more than 3,000 miles to the Mexican coast

lies a massive area of the Pacific Ocean called the Clarion Clipperton Zone or CCZ.

The zone covers more than 1.7 million square miles of water, and the sea bed below that

water, which is roughly 2.5 to 3.5 miles deep.

At those depths, the sea floor and the marine life on it exist in absolute darkness.

We know almost nothing about it.

A team of British researchers published a study earlier this summer that identified

at least 5,500 species living in the CCZ, and an astounding 90% of them were unknown

to science.

Discoveries so new, they hadn't even been named yet.

And their researchers say it's also possible that most of those plants and animals aren't

found anywhere else on Earth.

There's something else resting on the CCZ sea floor.

Rocky nodules that look like blackened potatoes, they're known as polymetallic nodules.

They're composed of layers of metallic orres that build up around marine debris.

It's not yet fully understood how that happens, but we do know the process takes millions

of years.

And over that time, the polymetallic nodules have become what some see as the most important

untapped resource of the modern world.

It's estimated that they contain 6 times as much cobalt, 3 times as much nickel, and 4

times as much of the rare earth metal yutrium as there is on land.

And it's all on the bottom of the ocean, amid one of the most pristine, untouched habitats

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