Deep sea mining is exactly what it sounds like: recovering minerals from the ocean floor. In practice the term usually points to one of three activities, collecting loose polymetallic nodules from the abyssal plains, extracting sulfide deposits around hydrothermal vents, or dredging cobalt-rich crusts from underwater mountains. The idea has been discussed for decades, but it has never operated at commercial scale in international waters.

It matters to the “$150 Trillion Birthright” presentation because Jim Rickards, a former general counsel at Long-Term Capital Management and best-selling author on currency and geopolitics, uses the deep sea as part of a wider story about American mineral wealth. Rickards runs model Press’s Strategic Intelligence letter, and his pitch argues that President Trump “opened 650 million acres of federal land containing an estimated $150 trillion in buried minerals.” Before we get to the stocks, it helps to understand what seabed mining actually involves and why the survey names in the pitch sit only loosely on top of it.

The Three Forms of Seabed Mining

The most talked-about target is the polymetallic nodule field, with the Clarion-Clipperton Zone in the Pacific as the headline example. Nodules form over millions of years and sit loose on the seafloor, rich in nickel, cobalt, copper, and manganese. Because they can be scooped rather than blasted, they are the closest thing the industry has to a straightforward harvest.

Hydrothermal vents host deposits of sulfides containing copper, zinc, gold, and silver, while cobalt-rich crusts cling to the flanks of seamounts. Each is technically harder and further from commercial reality than the nodule fields, and all of them sit inside a regulatory regime that is still being written.

Where the Survey Companies Fit

The pitch names three “MDP” companies, short for mineral discovery technology. They are Geospace Technologies, a maker of land and marine seismic equipment; TGS ASA, the Norwegian energy-data firm formed from the 2023 TGS and PGS merger; and MIND Technology, a maker of offshore seismic hardware under the Seamap brand. TGS ASA is the one most directly tied to the seafloor story, through a “Deep Sea Minerals Pathfinder” project it runs alongside its main business.

The honest part is important here. All three are oil and gas seismic companies, and their revenue has tracked energy exploration budgets rather than seabed minerals. Since the tease, Geospace is down 73.8% and MIND is down 56.8%, while TGS is up 8.9%. We explained the seafloor frontier itself in our deep-sea mining explainer, and the technology angle in our AI mineral exploration coverage.

The Fine Print on the Pitch

The presentation leans on numbers that deserve a closer look. The June 24, 2025 catalyst the original ad pointed to came and went without a surge, and the promised returns range from “1,520% gain potential” to “4,800% gain potential.” Federal leasing in practice grows gradually, on the order of a percent or so a year, and most BLM-managed land is already open to mineral claims, so the “must locate deposits before digging” mandate is not the clean new-market event the ad implies.

The offer is The Situation Report at $1,995 per year with no refunds. We have also written about how the rare earth and critical minerals pieces fit together in our rare earth stocks coverage and our critical minerals strategy explainer.

The Nodule Fields and the Regulatory Wait

The nodule fields are the headline because they are the most studied and, relatively, the most tractable. The Clarion-Clipperton Zone alone is estimated to hold more nickel, cobalt, and manganese than all known land reserves combined, a claim that has driven interest for decades even though no commercial harvesting has begun. Sulfide deposits around hydrothermal vents are richer in copper and precious metals but harder to reach and harder to regulate, and cobalt-rich crusts on seamounts remain the least developed of the three. For investors, the key distinction is between the resource, which is real and large, and the industry, which is still pre-revenue. Survey and equipment companies sit at the front of that industry: they would be among the first paid if harvesting ever begins at scale, but they are not the ones holding the mining licenses or bearing the engineering risk of lifting nodules to the surface. That is why the deep sea picks in this pitch are survey firms rather than miners, and why the distance between the two is the part worth keeping in view.

What Checks Out

The pick-and-shovel logic is genuinely sound: surveyors and equipment makers get paid on activity, not on finding anything. That is a lower-risk way to play exploration, and a working deep sea mining industry would need exactly the data and imaging work these companies already sell. The seafloor is a real, long-term frontier, and the companies themselves are legitimate businesses with durable franchises. The gap is between that potential and today’s revenue, which still rides the oil and gas cycle far more than any mining boom.

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