"The Ocean Edge" By CWP Fellow Eyck Freymann

In August 2017, the survey vessel Xiang Yang Hong 06, carrying a crew of 26, departed the Chinese port of Qingdao bound for the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. The remote stretch of ocean, about 2,000 miles southeast of Baja California, contains one of the world’s largest known resources of cobalt, copper, nickel and manganese. All across the Zone’s seabed, potato-shaped nodules rich in the critical minerals lie scattered, indistinguishable from rocks to the untrained eye. More in this series: The Diplomatic Deadlock The Adaptation Advantage Pole Position The ship’s operator, the vast state-owned conglomerate China Minmetals Corp., holds an exclusive exploration license from the International Seabed Authority (ISA) for over 70,000 square kilometers of the Zone. When it reached its destination, the ship sent down scooping devices to capture nodules while underwater drones glided silently over the seabed, sending up high-definition maps of the richest dep

The Ocean Edge: Climate change and geopolitics are setting up a scramble for the global oceans.

BY EYCK FREYMANN — NOVEMBER 6, 2022

https://www.thewirechina.com/2022/11/06/china-seabed-mining/

Eyck Freymann is a CWP fellow for 2022-23. Previously he was a doctoral candidate in China Studies at the University of Oxford, where he researches the geopolitics of climate change. He is Director of Indo-Pacific and global pandemic coverage at Greenmantle, a New York-based advisory firm, and a Non-Resident Research Fellow with the China Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College.

In the 2022–23 academic year he will be a joint Fellow at the Arctic Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the Columbia-Harvard China & the World Program.

Freymann’s first book, One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World (Harvard UP 2020), is assigned as required reading in Harvard’s “United States and China” introductory course for undergraduates. He also writes on a range of other current affairs topics, including U.S. politics and foreign policy and COVID-19. Freymann’s writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, The Economist, and The Atlantic, among others, and he is a reporter and columnist for The Wire China.

Freymann holds two masters degrees in China Studies: the first from Harvard University and the second from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Harvard-UK Henry Scholar. He earned his bachelors degree cum laude with highest honors in East Asian History from Harvard College.

Photo Credit: https://pixabay.com/users/veditsph-11263283/