How Deep-sea Mining Lands with Jonathan Galka

While often presented as a novel contemporary solution to meet the raw material demands of green technologies, deep-sea minerals have a nearly seventy-year history as a prospective resource frontier. In the mid-20th century, the prospect of deep-sea mining – particularly for minerals called manganese nodules and especially in areas far from coastal control – was a primary concern for both deep-sea science and emerging deep-sea law. Despite that commercial deep-sea mining would not come to pass (and indeed remains deferred even today), deep-sea mining’s potential consequences for ocean governance and ocean resource management were hotly debated before and during the third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (1973-1982). This talk considers how the specter of deep-sea mining has shaped debates over how to use and live with the ocean. It does this by attending to three coastal sites where deep-sea mining has come ashore: Msida, Malta, which hosted the first Pacem in Maribus conferences in the early 1970s; Kingston, Jamaica, which has hosted the International Seabed Authority since 1994; New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, which is a contemporary frontline for resistance against nearshore deep-sea mining.

Dr Galka is an assistant professor at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology’s Centre for Anthropocene History. His work on deep ocean resource frontiers has been recognized with the World History Association’s dissertation prize and the German Maritime Museum’s Maritime Cultural Heritage award. He has a PhD and MA in History of Science from Harvard University. During 2025–2026, he was a postdoctoral scholar at the NUS Asia Research Institute and an affiliate of the NTU Center for Contemporary Art on its Climate Change and Cultural Loss project.