Bleeding blue: All that we are looking to extract from the oceans

We know the ocean covers over 70% of the planet. What most of us don't really think about is that more than 60% of that vast expanse lies outside national boundaries, an unregulated immensity known as the high seas.
For most of human history, oceans have been mythologised rather than mapped. The dividing lines that do exist have been drawn in intriguing and somewhat arbitrary ways.
In the 18th century, for instance, a Dutch jurist proposed that a country's sovereign waters should extend as far as a cannon could fire from its coast, which turned out to be about three nautical miles (about 5.5 km). It was a brilliantly pragmatic solution: state control where defence was plausible, and freedom beyond.
The so-called 'cannon-shot rule' became law, and lived on until the 20th century. Then came oil rigs, trawlers and submarines, which called for upgrades in maritime monitoring.
In 1982, after years of Cold War-era wrangling, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea was signed, dividing waters into zones of control. (UNCLOS was ratified in 1994.)
Territorial waters were now considered to extend 12 nautical miles (about 22 km) from the coast. Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) extended to 200 nautical miles (about 370 km).
Beyond that remain the high seas: vast, largely ungoverned, and increasingly contested.
Fruit of the sea?
Meanwhile, we famously have better maps of Mars than we do of Earth's oceans.
Despite efforts made with satellites, submersibles and robots, an estimated 80% of the ocean remains unexplored. It doesn't help that light begins to dwindle rapidly beyond depths of 200 metres, and pressure builds. The Mariana Trench, for reference, sits at about 11,000 metres below sea level (deeper than Mount Everest is high).
It isn't just mystery that lives in these deeps. It is priceless utility.
The ocean is our thermostat, our oxygen engine, our pantry and, increasingly, our vault.
We have been drilling for oil and gas reserves for decades. Now we are eyeing reserves of metals such as cobalt, nickel and manganese, vital to current green-energy technology.
With nodules of these metals just sitting on the floor, there is talk of robots gliding about beneath the seas, gathering them up like underwater fruit.
Except one must first determine whose nodules they are, and how to safely reach them.
That safety, of course, relates primarily to the marine ecosystems themselves.
Hidden treasure
In 2023, after years of diplomatic inertia, the UN brokered the High Seas Treaty (officially, the Agreement on Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction; it's a good thing it has a nickname.)
The treaty aims to create protected marine areas, mandate environmental assessments, and determine how to share the benefits of marine resources.
This is a document born of rising anxiety: over vanishing species, collapsing ecosystems and the accelerating commodification of the deep. The treaty is not yet law. It has not been ratified and it is unclear how many countries will eventually sign on.
Meanwhile, the high seas are already being commercially explored. What lies beneath is considered too tempting.
Just one area, the 4.5-million-sq-km Clarion-Clipperton Zone between Hawaii and Mexico — an area larger than the European Union — is said to hold more battery-grade metals than all known land reserves.
UNCLOS also created the International Seabed Authority (ISA), to regulate mining in international waters. ISA, headquartered in Jamaica, has already issued 31 exploration licences worldwide. Its dual role, to regulate and promote, is an open contradiction. A new gold rush is underway.
Our final frontier
The biggest risk? That it is already too late to ask the right questions.
Unlike forests, the deep-sea floor has no history of human interference. Sediments settle over centuries. Scar them, and the wound may never heal.
In a study published in 2020, German researchers returned to a small patch of seabed off the coast of Peru, which they had disturbed 26 years earlier. Their tracks remained. Microbial life hadn't returned. Time had not healed the area; it had simply fossilised the damage.
We have no idea how the ocean responds to disturbance.
Other recent findings suggest that the nodules that are the focus of our newest gold rush aren't simply inert 'fruit' waiting to be collected. They are biological scaffolds, hosting microbes that may play a crucial role in nutrient cycles and oxygen production.
Still, the push continues. Many deep-sea mining companies promise cleaner extraction than on land. Better this, they argue, than poisoned villages and jungles razed to stubble as a result of mining activity.
They are not entirely wrong. But the framing is false. The choice may not be a binary. There are other paths: battery innovation, material substitutes, recycling.
What we lack isn't cobalt. It is patience, and perhaps humility.
And for what?
In research labs around the world, new battery chemistries are taking shape: sodium-ion systems that sidestep cobalt entirely, solid-state designs with safer materials. The very need driving seabed mining may disappear, not in decades but in years.
There is precedent. In the 1800s, whale oil was essential… for lamps, lubrication, industry. Then came electricity, the lightbulb and fossil fuels. Demand collapsed. Whales didn't survive because we found compassion. They survived because we found something better.
What if we're solving for the wrong scarcity?
Yet, the machines are already descending.
China, the US and the EU are testing new devices. India has secured two ISA exploration licences. Tiny Pacific Island countries are looking forward to profiting from holding the keys to the most accessible expanses, even as sea levels rise to what could be, for them, island-extinction levels.
There is a photograph that captures something of the conundrum: a deep-sea octopus guarding its eggs, nestled on a bed of manganese nodules.
It is a reminder that the sea isn't a vault. It is a nursery. Our world's wondrous balancing engine. And we don't really know how it works.
Yet, our engines of extraction won't wait, neither for innovation nor hindsight.
There is a pattern here, and it's not a new one. We rush before we reckon.
This time, we are rushing into Earth's oldest, largest, possibly most defining biome.
Is it more batteries we need, or more balance?
***
In Hindu myth, the gods and demons churned the cosmic ocean to retrieve amrit, the nectar of immortality. But before the amrit, this yielded halahala, a poison so potent it threatened to destroy all life. Shiva, the god of destruction, had to swallow it to save the world.
It is the oldest story we tell about extraction: treasure and terror, released together.
It is wise to fear the ocean. It has never cared for surface designs.
(Kashyap Kompella is an industry analyst and author of two books on AI)

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The Hindu

8 hours ago

• The Hindu

Is it a moon? Is it a dwarf planet? Well, it's Charon, and it could well be both!

Charon's discovery The story of Charon's discovery takes us back to 1978 – a time when even astronomers were still thinking that Pluto was a planet. Little was known about Pluto and its system, but all that was about to change in the decades that followed. On the morning of June 22, American astronomer James Christy already had his head whirling around. If you were under the impression that he was zeroing in on the solution for an astronomical problem, you couldn't be further from the truth. Christy was sharpening his plans to move his house, getting ready for a week's leave from the U.S. Naval Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona – his workplace. It was under these circumstances that Robert Harrington, his boss, handed him a set of six photographs of Pluto. Christy and Harrington were looking to refine Pluto's orbit around the sun – a journey that takes Pluto 248 Earth years. Pluto's average distance from the sun is 5.9 billion km. The technology available at that time meant that even the best photographs of it hardly revealed anything. What's more, these six images – acquired in pairs over three nights in the month between April 13 and May 12 – were labelled as 'defective.' Odd blobs The reason why these pictures were labelled thus owed to the fact that they revealed Pluto to be oddly elongated. Viewing them under a microscope, Christy noticed that the fuzzy blob that was to be Pluto stretched in a northern direction in two of those pairs, while the final pair showed a southward direction. The defects were attributed either to atmospheric distortion or improper optical alignment in the telescope used for observations. After ruling out an explosion on Pluto as an unlikely explanation – especially as it lasted a month – Christy searched for other plausible reasons. There was a chance that Pluto itself was irregular in shape. Or could there be an unseen moon, even though one of his former professors, celebrated Dutch-American astronomer Gerard Kuiper, had searched for exactly the same decades earlier without any success? When Christy went over to the archives to check through older plates from 1965 onwards, there it was... the same elongation. What's more, all these images had also been dismissed as defective on every occasion. Correct conclusions Christy and Harrington, however, realised that they were onto something. By reviewing all the images with the elongations, they were able to state that the bulge occurred with a predictable frequency. This frequency of the unseen moon's orbital period – 6.4 Earth days – matched with what astronomers believed to be Pluto's rotational period, suggesting a synchronously locked binary system. The duo ruled out other possible reasons for the bulge and concluded correctly that Pluto had another companion at a distance of 19,640 km. The discovery of 'S/1978 P1' was announced by them through the International Astronomical Union (IAU) on July 7 and their findings were published in the Astronomical Journal. What started out as reviewing six defective images, served as the seeds for a whole new discovery. As Christy himself once pointed out, 'Discovery is where the scientist touches nature in its least predictable aspect.' What's in a name? As the discoverer, Christy wanted to exercise his rights for naming Pluto's companion. And he had his mind set on naming it after his wife. The Naval Observatory he worked for had suggested the name Persephone, the wife of Hades. Hades, the god of the underworld in Greek mythology, was the equivalent of the Roman god Pluto after which it is named. As luck would have it, Christy came across a reference to Charon, a boatman who ferried the dead across a river in the underworld to Hades. Charon's close mythical association with Hades, or Pluto, made it a great option for the newly discovered astronomical object. It was the perfect option for Christy as his wife's name was Charlene. In addition to sharing the first four letters, 'Char' was the nickname that friends and family used to call his wife. Just like how protons and electrons have the 'on' suffix, Christy saw Charon as 'Char' with the suffix 'on' and submitted his name. Eclipses and occultations By the time this name was accepted by IAU in January 1986, Pluto and Charon had a series of mutual eclipses and occultations. Studying them enabled astronomers in general, and Harrington in particular, to confirm the existence of Charon as he observed the eclipses and occultations to occur as predicted. Observing Pluto and Charon in this manner also enabled astronomers to arrive at Charon's diameter to be about 1,200 km, while also arriving at better estimates of the size and mass of Pluto. From a small dot in a photograph, Charon had become much much more – almost a world in its own right. It definitely meant the world to Christy in more ways than one, as he was also able to gift his wife the moon! Charlene Christy probably summed it the best when she said 'A lot of husbands promise their wives the moon, but Jim actually delivered.' Charon fact sheet Most of what we know about Charon, or even Pluto for that matter, is thanks to NASA's New Horizons mission. Approved in 2001 as the first flyby of Pluto and its largest moon Charon, it was launched in January 2006. This was months before IAU's decision in August the same year to demote Pluto's designation from a planet to a dwarf planet. Despite the fact that Pluto was plutoed, the mission went on, providing us invaluable information. Before New Horizons' closest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015, the spacecraft captured plenty of images of Charon. While the images revealed a striking reddish north (top) polar region, Charon's colour palette wasn't as diverse as Pluto's. The origins of this red colouration is a mystery for now and no other icy object in the solar system sports a similar feature. Charon is 1,214 km across and is at a distance of 19,640 km from Pluto. As Pluto's equatorial diameter is about 2,377 km, Charon is nearly half the size of Pluto. This makes it the largest known satellite relative to its parent body for most astronomers. It is this same size, however, that forces other astronomers to consider Pluto and Charon as a double dwarf planet system. Charon's orbit takes 6.4 Earth days to go around Pluto. Charon neither rises or sets, however, but instead hovers near the same region on Pluto's surface. The same surfaces of Charon and Pluto always face each other due to a phenomenon called mutual tidal locking.

Mint

19 hours ago

• Mint

AI didn't take the job. It changed what the job is.

Over the past few weeks, I've been on the road. Parbhani, Pune, Chennai, Jaipur. In small-town labs and factory floors, I saw jobs that still exist, but don't look like they used to In Parbhani I met Dr. Chaitanya, who runs a 24-hour diagnostics lab above a heart clinic. He told me he's failed to detect cancer before—not out of neglect, but because he was worn out. Now, when something doesn't feel right, he runs the slide through a machine. It doesn't get distracted. It doesn't get tired. It caught leukaemia in a boy whose report looked normal at first glance. In Jaipur I spent time inside Wipro's factories. I met Chandni—just out of college, far from home—running a CNC machine built for someone twice her size. The platform was raised to fit her. Sensors pause the line if she skips a step. She's not fighting the machine. She's learning to work with it. And then I came back to Bengaluru. Over the weekend, I caught up with a few junior engineers—entry-level coders, recently let go. We sat in a noisy café near HSR, talking about layoffs. Some of their friends—older, with fatter salaries—had been let go, too, from well-known names on Outer Ring Road. Most of them hadn't told their families yet. Someone joked their severance would go into a 'detox trip". But the silence after that said more. Also read | Mary Meeker's AI report: Decoding what it signals for India's tech future I kept thinking about all of it. From Parbhani to Jaipur to Bengaluru, I've seen AI reshape work—but in such unsettling ways. In some places, it keeps people going. In others, it shuts the door. And I've come back with questions I can't truly answer. Who gets to stay in the game? Who gets to rewrite their role? And who just disappears? *** We've spent years asking the wrong question. It's never been just 'Will AI take jobs?" That's the headline version—the one that misses what's actually unfolding on the ground. What I've seen is something slower and harder to name: jobs are shifting shape. The work still exists, but it doesn't look like it used to. Doctors don't just rely on training—they rely on machines to catch what their fatigue might miss. Factory workers aren't lifting metal—they're supervising systems. Engineers aren't writing code—they're managing what the agents spit out. In some places, people are being lifted. In others, pushed out. This isn't about replacement. It's about redefinition. And not everyone is getting the chance to adapt. *** In Parbhani, Dr. Chaitanya isn't trying to be some AI-era pathologist. He just doesn't want to miss a sign of cancer again. He bought the scanner not because anyone sold him a pitch-deck future, but because he was tired. Because late at night, after hours of non-stop samples, the eyes slip. And he knows what that costs. The machine doesn't replace his judgment – it just doesn't lose focus when he does. In Jaipur, Wipro didn't automate Chandni out. They built the floor to fit her. She's running a CNC machine designed for someone taller, stronger—but they raised the platform instead. Her job wasn't taken. It was made possible. She oversees the system now. And when she sends money home, there's no debate anymore about whether girls can handle mechanical work. Also read: Indian companies lag in workforce upskilling amid AI disruption, job cuts And then there's Bengaluru. The coders I met had barely started. A few months in, then gone. Not for bad performance. Just… gone. Their work was handed to tools they weren't trained to supervise. Their seniors—some drawing seven-figure salaries—were asked to leave too. One of them said most of his severance would go into a detox trip. We all laughed. But it didn't feel funny. Same tool. But in Parbhani, it buys time. In Jaipur, it makes the job possible. In Bengaluru, it ends it. **** There's something I've been noticing everywhere lately—in factories, hospitals, GCCs, even small startups. Someone in the room knows how to work with the AI. Not just use it, but shape it. Prompt it right. Catch when it's wrong. That person sets the tone for how work flows. And then there's everyone else. Trying to keep up. Hoping they're not left behind. It's not just a skill gap. It's who gets the confidence to speak up. Who gets the permission to push back when the machine's answer doesn't feel right. Who gets to set the rules for how AI shows up—and who's left cleaning up after it. One founder told me straight: 'We're not hiring another ops exec. We're hiring someone to manage the agents." The job still exists. It just looks different now. And the person who knows how to talk to the machine gets to decide how everyone else works around it. That's the shift I can't ignore. It's not about mass layoffs. It's about brutal sidelining. Not fired. Still on payroll. But it is no longer in the loop. *** I keep coming back to something Andy Grove once said. Intel was stuck in the memory chip business, losing ground fast. Grove turned to CEO Gordon Moore and asked, 'If we were fired, and the board brought in someone new, what do you think they'd do?" Moore said, 'They'd get us out of memories." Grove paused, then said, 'Then why don't we walk out the door, come back in, and do it ourselves?" And that's what they did. They walked back in and changed the company. Also read: Microsoft envisions a web driven by AI agents. What will it look like? What stayed with me wasn't the decision itself—it was the mindset. They gave themselves permission to reset. Same chairs. Same table. Just a different way of thinking. Most people I meet don't get to do that. In every workplace I've visited lately—factories, hospitals, GCCs—there's always someone who gets to reframe the game. The person who speaks up, shapes the tool, sets the tone. Everyone else is just trying to stay in the room. Or figuring out the exit. *** I asked Dr. Chaitanya if he ever worries AI will take over his work. He didn't hesitate. 'I just don't want to miss what matters," he said. 'Let the machine help with the rest." Chandni said the same thing, in different words. 'If it helps us do the work better, why fear it?" Neither of them were trying to protect their turf. They just wanted the tools to hold up when it counted. When they're tired. When something's easy to miss. When a mistake can't be undone. They weren't talking about AI as a threat. They weren't talking about it as the future. They were talking about the work—what it asks of them, what it gives back, and what they still want to hold on to. ***** So yes, people will need to learn. New tools, new ways of working, new habits. That's always been part of work. But before any of that, they need a little space to figure things out. To ask questions without sounding slow. To try, to fumble, to not know right away—and not be punished for it. Because the bigger risk isn't that AI takes your job. Also read: Why AI is central to the new browser wars It's that you're still in the role, still showing up every day—but slowly pushed out of the decisions. Not because you can't contribute. But because no one gave you the chance to learn how. And by the time you notice what's changed, the work has already moved on—without your voice in the room. Pankaj Mishra is a journalist and co-founder of FactorDaily. He has spent over two decades reporting on technology, startups, and work in India with a focus on the people and places often left out of the spotlight.

NDTV

2 days ago

• NDTV

Scientists Recreate Face Of 10,500-Year-Old Woman Using DNA

Researchers at Ghent University have reconstructed the visage of a pale, dark-haired, blue-eyed prehistoric woman who lived 10,500 years ago in what is now Belgium. They produced an amazing image, depicting the face of a woman who lived and died in the Meuse River valley, using ancient DNA. In 1988, the remains of the Mesolithic woman were found in the Margaux cave, which is close to Dinant. She was a hunter-gatherer from Western Europe, the same group as the popular Cheddar Man from Great Britain. DNA studies showed the Margaux woman's eyes were blue, just like Cheddar Man's. She did, however, have a somewhat lighter complexion than the majority of other Mesolithic individuals in Western Europe examined so far. It is a minor but crucial detail, according to the project's lead geneticist, Dr. Maite Rivollat. The reconstruction of her face and living conditions was made possible by a mix of anatomical, genetic, and archaeological data. Ghent University archaeologist Isabelle De Groote told CNN that the 'Meuse Woman' was from the same ethnicity as the Cheddar Man, who lived in what is now the United Kingdom at the time, but had a lighter complexion. "We could also infer from the skull that she was between 35 and 60 years old," De Groote told CNN. The prehistoric Belgian woman also resembled Cheddar Man with a prominent nasal bridge. "She also has noticeable brow ridges, even though she's a woman," De Groote added. University archaeologist Philippe Crombe said that "quite good quality" DNA was extracted from the woman's skull so that "a very detailed reconstruction" could be made. While some of her features, like her jewellery and tattoos, are based on archaeological data gathered from previous digs in the River Meuse basin, helping researchers create a picture of the woman's daily life — her complexion, hair, and eyes are all based on ancient DNA. The creative team also used archaeological evidence, such as tools, shells, paints, and camp remnants. This made her world come to life, along with her face. Every detail was meticulously recreated, from hunting methods to transportation, from plants to animals. The remains of the 'Meuse Woman' were discovered in the Margaux cave in Dinant in 1988-1989, along with the remains of eight other women. This was "an unusual finding" because the majority of Mesolithic burial sites include a mix of men, women, and children. The reconstruction was carried out in cooperation with Dutch artists Kennis and Kennis and researchers from the ROAM project (a Regional Outlook on Ancient Migration), an interdisciplinary effort comprising archaeologists, bioanthropologists, geneticists, and artists.