The Clarion-Clipperton Zone, often shortened to the CCZ, is the single largest concentration of untapped metal on Earth. It stretches across millions of square kilometers of Pacific seafloor between Hawaii and Mexico, and it is blanketed with potato-sized rocks called polymetallic nodules. Each nodule is packed with nickel, cobalt, copper, and manganese, the metals that go into batteries, wiring, and the alloys modern industry runs on.
This deep sea frontier has become a quiet backdrop to a much louder story. Jim Rickards, a former general counsel at Long-Term Capital Management and a best-selling author on currency and geopolitics, has been pitching his “$150 Trillion Birthright” presentation through model Press. The argument opens with a claim that President Trump “opened 650 million acres of federal land containing an estimated $150 trillion in buried minerals.” Rickards runs model Press’s Strategic Intelligence letter, and the deep sea is only part of the picture he paints. Our job here is to separate what the CCZ actually is from what the pitch implies it could become.
What the Clarion-Clipperton Zone Actually Is
The CCZ sits in international waters, beyond any single nation’s borders, and is administered by the International Seabed Authority. The nodules that cover its floor form over millions of years as metals precipitate out of seawater around a tiny core. Because they sit loose on the seabed rather than buried in rock, they can in theory be collected without hard-rock mining, which is part of why the region attracts so much attention.
The scale is genuinely large. Nickel, cobalt, and manganese from these nodules map closely onto the battery supply chain, and copper remains one of the most broadly useful metals on the planet. If the technical and regulatory hurdles are ever cleared, the CCZ represents a real source of supply that does not depend on any single country’s politics.
How the Birthright Pitch Uses the Deep Sea
Rickards’s presentation names three companies he calls “MDP” picks, shorthand for mineral discovery technology. One of them, the “Wildcat,” is framed as the deep sea play. The three companies are Geospace Technologies, TGS ASA, and MIND Technology, all established survey and equipment businesses. Since the tease, Geospace is down 73.8% and MIND down 56.8%, while TGS is up 8.9%.
Here is the honest wrinkle. These are oil and gas seismic companies. Their revenue has tracked energy exploration budgets for decades, not mineral discovery on the seafloor. TGS ASA does operate a “Deep Sea Minerals Pathfinder” project on the side, which is real, but it is a small part of a business built on licensing offshore seismic data to oil and gas customers. The CCZ is a fascinating story; it is just not yet the main driver of these companies’ income statements.
The Fine Print Worth Knowing
The offer behind all of this is The Situation Report, Rickards’s higher-priced letter at $1,995 per year, with no refunds. The June 24, 2025 catalyst that the original pitch pointed to came and went without a surge, and the promotional numbers attached to the picks range from “1,520% gain potential” to “4,800% gain potential.” Those are forecasts, not guarantees, and they sit a long way from the recent share price reality.
We covered the broader critical minerals story in our critical minerals strategy explainer, and we have written about how AI is changing mineral exploration and about rare earth stocks for readers who want the wider picture.
The Long Horizon of the CCZ
The extraction question is the reason the CCZ has stayed a frontier rather than a producing region. Nodules sit loose on the abyssal plain, so collecting them in theory means running robotic collector vehicles across the seafloor and lifting nodules to the surface through a riser pipe, rather than blasting through hard rock. That relative simplicity is balanced by real environmental unknowns. The deep seabed hosts ecosystems that grow and recover slowly, and the International Seabed Authority has spent years writing rules that weigh access against that cost. So far the agency has issued exploration contracts but not the commercial harvesting licenses that would turn the CCZ into revenue. That timing matters, because it means the deep sea story is a long horizon rather than a twelve-month catalyst, and the pitch frames it as part of an imminent land rush that in practice moves far more deliberately. For an investor, that is the difference between a real long-term frontier and a short-term trade.
What We Genuinely Like
The pick-and-shovel logic underneath the pitch is sound. Survey firms and equipment makers get paid on activity, whether or not anyone finds a deposit, which is a lower-risk way to play a resource theme than betting on a single discovery. The CCZ itself is a legitimate long-term frontier, and a working deep sea mining industry would need exactly the kind of survey and data work these companies already do.
What deserves a pause is the distance between the CCZ’s potential and the revenue these three companies actually earn today. The nodule fields are real, but the companies being pitched are, at their core, oil and gas seismic businesses. That is not a knock on them; it is simply what the fine print shows.
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