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You're listening to Shorewave from NPR.

Hey, Short Waverver is Regina Barbara here.

And Emily Kwong with news.

We've reached the final episode in our summertime series, Sea Camp.

And our final story brings us back to the ocean floor, the benthic zone.

With one of the most significant human activities in the deep sea, mining.

The deep sea is home to a lot of things.

Animals.

Sand.

But it's also sediment.

But it's also home to nodules of rare earth elements.

Elements used for everything from smartphones to electric cars to fighter jets.

And the ones that are of economic interest are then cobalt, nickel, copper, rare earth elements, lithium, and others.

This is Matthias Heckel, a marine geochemist at Guilmard Helmholt Center for Ocean Research Keel in Germany.

Currently, these metals, cobalt, nickel, copper,

are mined on land, which is super destructive to the environment. So mining companies have long wanted

to open the ocean for commercial mining. But commercial mining in the deep sea is not regulated.

There's no blueprint for how to do it safely. Which is why, for the last decade,

the UN's international seabed authority has worked to draw up regulations, basically rules for

how countries should mine in international waters. At the UN Ocean Summit in early June, the UN's

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