Captain Jack G. Newman, U.S. Navy Reserve (Retired) | Published on 12/28/2025
There is a world that is totally and everlastingly surreal. Never seen, never visited, never exposed to photonic energy of any frequency, it is beyond darkness—a solid blackness, covering about 50 percent of the earth’s crust. At depths of 13,124 to 19,681 feet, it’s known as the Abyssal Plain.
More people have been to the moon than to the Abyssal Plain.
It is a world where slight changes in sea pressure and temperature precipitate minerals around small particles of sharks’ teeth or skeletal remains to form millions of years’ worth of nodules rich in manganese, cobalt, iron, copper, and titanium. They range from the size of a small marble to more than 6 inches in diameter, and they cover most of the Pacific Ocean floor. It has taken Mother Nature millions of years to produce these nodules, a few small fractions of an inch per millennium, which in today’s resource-conscious world should demand careful, serious deliberations before deep ocean mining is permitted.
But in the 1970s, nodule mining provided the perfect cover story for Project Azorian—the Howard Hughes–backed classified mission to retrieve the sunken Soviet submarine K-129.
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