The Post-Second World War Deep-Sea Minerals Scene

Initial economic interest in deep-sea minerals more or less coincided with the post-war boom and was largely a result of it. Early assessments of their worth in the late 1950s and early 1960s were very positive, leading to an interest in them by both mining companies and governments. However, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, more pessimistic assessments of their worth were published. Nevertheless, US mining companies commenced exploration for them in the 1960s and this continued throughout most of the 1970s. At the same time, the United Nations was considering the legal implications of possible deep-sea mining, culminating in the Law of the Sea Convention of 1982. The possible effects of deep-sea mining on the marine environment were hardly considered in the 1950s and 1960s, but by the mid-1970s the issue was taken more seriously, leading to the DOMES experiments in the late 1970s.