Another climate disaster in the making as various mining companies are ramping up for access to the seabed beneath international waters, which contain more valuable minerals than all the continents combined. "Most of these licenses authorize contractors to exploit a single deepwater plain. Known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, it extends across 1.7 million square miles between Hawaii and Mexico—wider than the continental United States. When the Mining Code is approved, more than a dozen companies will accelerate their explorations in the CCZ to industrial-scale extraction. Their ships and robots will use vacuum hoses to suck nodules and sediment from the seafloor, extracting the metal and dumping the rest into the water. How many ecosystems will be covered by that sediment is impossible to predict."