Robbing A Bank
When No One’s Looking

The Saya de Malha Bank is so existentially crucial to the planet because it is one of the world’s biggest seagrass meadows and thus carbon sinks. Much like trees on land, seagrass absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stores it in its roots and soil. But seagrass does it especially fast—at a rate 35 times that of tropical rainforest. What makes the situation in the Saya de Malha Bank even more urgent is that it’s being systematically decimated by a multi-national fleet of fishing ships that virtually no one tracks or polices.

More than five hundred years ago, when Portuguese sailors came across a shallow-water bank on the high seas over 700 miles east of the northern tip of Mauritius, they named it Saya de Malha, or “mesh skirt,” to describe the rolling waves of seagrass below the surface. In 2012, UNESCO considered Saya de Malha as a potential candidate to become a Marine World Heritage site, for its “Potential Outstanding Universal Value.” UNESCO described the bank as “globally unique,”concluding that it was covered in what is likely the largest seagrass meadow in the world.

Seagrasses are frequently overlooked because they are rare, estimated to cover only a tenth of one percent of the ocean floor. “They are the forgotten ecosystem,” said Ronald Jumeau, the Seychelles Ambassador for Climate Change. Nevertheless, seagrasses are far less protected than other offshore areas. Only 26 percent of recorded seagrass meadows fall within marine protected areas, compared with 40 percent of coral reefs and 43 percent of the world’s mangroves.

Often described as the lungs of the ocean, seagrasses capture about a fifth of all its carbon and they are home to vast biodiversity. Thousands of species, including in the Saya de Malha Bank, many as yet unknown to science, depend on seagrasses for their survival. But the planet has lost roughly a third of them since the late nineteenth century and we lose 7 percent more each year – roughly equivalent to losing a football pitch of seagrass every 30 minutes. 

Seagrass also cleans polluted water and protects coastlines from erosion, according to a 2021 report by the University of California, Davis. At a time when at least eight million tons of plastic end up in the ocean every year, seagrass traps microplastics by acting as a dense net, catching debris and locking it into the sediment, found a 2021 study in Nature Scientific Reports. At a time when ocean acidification threatens the survival of the world’s coral reefs and the thousands of fish species that inhabit them, seagrasses reduce acidity by absorbing carbon through photosynthesis, and provide shelters, nurseries, and feeding grounds for thousands of species, including endangered animals such as dugongs, sharks, and seahorses. 

But the Saya de Malha is under threat. More than 200 distant-water vessels – most of them from Sri Lanka and Taiwan – have parked in the deeper waters along the edge of the bank over the past few years to catch tuna, lizardfish, scad and forage fish that is turned into protein-rich fishmeal, a type of animal feed. Ocean conservationists say that efforts to conserve the bank’s sea grass are not moving fast enough to make a difference. “It’s like walking north on a southbound train,” Heidi Weiskel, Acting Head of Global Ocean Team for IUCN.

On May 23, 2022, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution to declare March 1 as World Seagrass Day. The resolution was sponsored by Sri Lanka. Speaking at the assembly, the Permanent Representative of Sri Lanka to the UN, Ambassador Mohan Pieris, said seagrasses were “one of the most valuable marine ecosystems on earth,” highlighting, among other things, their outsized contribution to carbon sequestration. But recognition is one thing; action is another. As the ambassador gave his speech in New York, dozens of ships from his country’s fishing fleet were 9,000 miles away, busily scraping the biggest of those very ecosystems he was calling on the world to protect.

In November 2022, several scientists in scuba gear dove over the side of a 440-foot research ship, which had been sent to the Saya de Malha Bank. Their goal that day was to film sharks. When they were not diving, the scientists submerged a remote-controlled submarine to search the sea column. Ranked as one of the largest and most advanced research vessels in the world, the ship had been sent to this remote stretch by the environmental non-profit Monaco Explorations to document a seafloor famously lush in seagrass, corals, turtles, dugongs, rays, and other species.

During the three weeks that the research team combed the waters of the Saya de Malha Bank, they spotted not a single shark.

The likely culprit, according to the scientists, was a fleet of more than 200 fishing ships that have in recent years targeted these remote waters, mostly from Taiwan, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Many of these ships target tuna species like albacore, yellowfin, skipjack, and bigeye, but they are also catching sharks in huge numbers.

Sharks play a critical role in the ecosystem as guardians of the seagrass, policing populations of turtles and other animals that would mow down all the seagrass if left unchecked. Catching sharks is not easy, nor is it usually inadvertent. In tuna longlining, the ship uses a line made of thick monofilament, with baited hooks attached at intervals. Many tuna longliners directly target sharks using special steel leads designed not to break as the bigger, stronger sharks try to yank themselves free. 

To avoid wasting space in the ship hold, deckhands usually throw the rest of the shark back into the water after they cut off the fins, which can sell for a hundred times the cost of the rest of the meat. It’s a wasteful process and a slow death, as the sharks, still alive but unable to swim, sink to the seafloor. To offset poverty wages, ship captains typically allow their crew to supplement their income by keeping the fins to sell at port, off books.

In 2015, more than fifty Thai fishing vessels, primarily bottom trawlers, descended on the Saya de Malha Bank to drag their nets over the ocean floor and scoop up brushtooth lizardfish and round scad, much of which was transported back to shore to be ground into fishmeal. At least thirty of these vessels arrived in the bank after fleeing crackdowns on fishing violations in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. The Thai fleet routinely targeted sharks in the Saya de Malha Bank, according to an investigation conducted by Greenpeace.

Trafficking survivors who worked in the Saya de Malha Bank on two of the vessels—the Kor Navamongkolchai 1 and Kor Navamongkolchai 8—told Greenpeace that up to fifty percent of their catch had been sharks. In 2016, a Thai government report found 24 vessels returning from Saya de Malha Bank had committed fishing violations, mostly from a lack of valid fishing gear licenses. “The impact of the trawl fishery on seabed ecosystems is likely to have been catastrophic,” said a 2022 study by the environmental non-profit Monaco Explorations. Since then, the Thai presence in the Saya de Malha Bank has diminished, and in 2024 only two Thai vessels targeted the area.

The Sri Lankans and Taiwanese have continued to fish the bank intensely. Of the more than 100 Sri Lankan vessels that have fished in the Saya de Malha since January 2022, when the country’s fleet first began broadcasting vessel locations publicly, about half—or roughly 44—use gillnets, according to vessel data from the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission. These gillnetters operate across the Indian Ocean, and a number of the vessels were observed at the bank by the 2022 Monaco Explorations expedition. Sharks are especially vulnerable to gillnets, which account for 64 percent of shark catches recorded by the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission.

On August 17, 2024, a video was posted to YouTube showing dozens of shark and ray carcasses recently unloaded from vessels in the Sri Lankan port of Beruwala. In the video, a man butchers one shark with a machete, dark blood pooling on the concrete of the harbor as he hacks at the body, removing its fins and hauling entrails from the carcass. Several videos showing similar scenes—hundreds of dead sharks, some without fins, being unloaded from fishing vessels and lined up on Sri Lankan harbors for sale to local exporters—have been uploaded to YouTube over the past two years.

The videos offer a window on the booming trade that has decimated local shark populations: about two-thirds of Sri Lanka’s domestic shark and ray species are listed as threatened by extinction by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. That threat has now moved further afield, to the high seas far from Sri Lankan shores, including to the Saya de Malha, putting yet more pressure on an ecosystem UNESCO has described as “globally unique,” an underwater jewel that, should it disappear, could never be replaced.

Historically, Sri Lankan vessels have targeted sharks in domestic waters. Between 2014 and 2016, for example, 84 percent of reported shark catches came from domestic vessels, according to research into the Sri Lankan shark and ray trade published in 2021. But as domestic populations declined, vessels, among them the fleet of gillnetters, moved to the high seas, leading to a new boom in the fin trade. Sri Lanka’s annual exports of fins quadrupled in the last decade, according to UN Comtrade data, with 110 tons exported in 2023, primarily to Hong Kong, compared to just 28 tons in 2013.

Tracking data also shows that over 40 of the Sri Lankan vessels do not publicly broadcast their location while in the bank. This practice is a persistent barrier to ocean conservation, because it masks the true scale of the fleet or hides when these ships plan to engage in illegal behavior.

However, these “dark vessels” can be tracked by monitoring the signals from their fishing buoys. Sri Lankan vessels can have up to a dozen fishing buoys, each with its own unique identification signal, Sri Lankan fishing records indicate. 

At least one of these “hidden” vessels that fished in the Saya de Malha between March and June 2024, the IMUL-A-0064 KMN, was detained in August 2024 by Sri Lankan authorities with over half a ton of oceanic white-tip shark carcasses aboard, all with their fins removed. Catching oceanic white-tip sharks is prohibited under Sri Lankan law, as is the removal of shark fins at sea. This was not an isolated incident: Sri Lankan authorities have seized illegally harvested shark fins on at least 25 separate occasions since January 2021, according to press releases from the Sri Lankan Coast Guard.

Though Taiwanese law does not allow vessels to engage in shark finning, the practice still takes place. In a sample of 62 Taiwanese vessels fishing on the high seas between 2018 and 2020, half engaged in shark finning, according to the Environmental Justice Foundation, which interviewed former crew on the ships. At least one of the Taiwanese vessels that fishes in the Saya de Malha, the Ho Hsin Hsing No. 601, was penalized in May 2023 for having dried shark fins in its vessel hold. The vessel operator was fined the equivalent of $123,000 and had their fishing license suspended for a month. The ship had last fished in the Saya de Malha between September and October 2022.

Why should anyone care about the disappearance of sharks in the Saya de Malha Bank? 

Ernest Hemingway once described going bankrupt as something that happens gradually… and then suddenly. The extinction of species is like bankruptcy, and when it finally occurs, there’s no going back. If we keep draining the Bank of one of its most previous riches, a “sudden” reckoning may be soon.

In October 2022, a British-American couple, Kyle and Maryanne Webb, were sailing their yacht through a remote area of the Indian Ocean, just south of the Saya de Malha Bank. The Webbs were sailing enthusiasts, and they had covered tens of thousands of miles on their vessel, the Begonia, over the previous years. As they passed the bank, they spotted a small fishing vessel, about 55 feet in length, painted bright yellow and turquoise, with about a dozen red and orange flags billowing from the roof of its cabin. It was a Sri Lankan gillnet boat called, in Sinhali, the Hasaranga Putha.

Looking gaunt and desperate, the crew told the Webbs, having sailed roughly 2,000 miles from their home port in Beruwala, Sri Lanka, they had been at sea for two weeks and had only caught four fish. They begged the Webbs for food, soda, and cigarettes. The Webbs gave them what they could, including fresh water, then headed on their way. “They were clearly in a struggling financial position,” Mrs. Webb said. “It broke my heart to see the efforts they feel they must go to to provide for their families.”

A month later, again near the Saya de Malha Bank, the Hasaranga Putha hailed another vessel—the South African ocean research and supply ship S.A. Agulhas II, which was on an expedition in Saya de Malha for the environmental non-profit Monaco Explorations. By this time, the Sri Lankan crew was almost out of fuel so they begged for diesel from the new passersby. The scientists did not have the right type of petrol to offer but they still boarded a dinghy and brought the fishers water and cigarettes. The Sri Lankans gave the scientists fish in appreciation. The Sri Lankan fishers would remain at sea for another six months, not returning to Colombo until April 2023.

Hundreds of miles from the nearest port, the Saya de Malha Bank is one of the most remote areas on the planet, which means it can be a harrowing workplace for the thousands of fishers from a half dozen countries that make this perilous journey. The farther from shore that vessels travel, and the more time they spend at sea, the more the risks pile up: dangerous storms, deadly accidents, malnutrition, and physical violence are common threats faced by distant-water crews. Among the longest trips, often in the least equipped boats, are made annually by a fleet of several dozen Sri Lankan gill-netters.

Some of the vessels that fish the Saya de Malha Bank engage in a practice called transshipment, where they offload their catch to refrigerated carriers without returning to shore so that they can remain fishing on the high seas for longer periods of time. Fishing is the most dangerous occupation in the world, and more than 100,000 fishers die on the job each year. When they do, particularly on longer journeys far from shore, it is not uncommon for their bodies to be buried at sea. 

But Sri Lankan gillnetters are not the only fishers making a perilous journey to target this biodiverse seascape. Thai fishmeal trawlers also target these waters, traveling more than 2,500 nautical miles from the port of Kantang. At its height, this fleet numbered above 70 vessels, which were decimating the sea grass and were notorious for their working conditions.

In January 2016, for example, three of these Thai ships left the Saya de Malha Bank and returned to Thailand. During the journey, 38 Cambodian crew members fell ill, and by the time they returned to port, six had already died. The remaining sick crew were hospitalized and treated for beriberi, a disease caused by a deficiency of Vitamin B1, or thiamine. Symptoms include tingling, burning, numbness, difficulty breathing, lethargy, chest pain, dizziness, confusion, and severe swelling.

Easily preventable yet fatal if left untreated, beriberi has historically appeared in prisons, asylums, and migrant camps, but it has largely been stamped out. Experts say that when it occurs at sea, beriberi often indicates criminal neglect (one medical examiner described it as “slow-motion murder”) because it is so easily treatable and avoidable. 

The disease has become more prevalent on distant-water fishing vessels in part because ships stay so long at sea, a trend facilitated by transshipment. Working practices involving hard labor and extensive working hours cause the body to deplete vitamin B1 at a faster metabolic rate to produce energy, the Thai government concluded in a report on the deaths. Further research done by Greenpeace found that some of the workers were victims of forced labor.

Today, fewer vessels from the Thai fleet are traveling to the Saya de Malha Bank, but some still make the trip, and questions about their working conditions linger. In April 2023, one of those vessels, the Chokephoemsin 1, a bright blue 90-foot trawler, set out for the Saya de Malha Bank with a crew member named Ae Khunsena, who boarded the ship in Samut Prakan, Thailand for a five-month tour, according to a report compiled by Stella Maris, a non-profit organization that helps fishers. As is typical on high-seas vessels, the hours were long and punishing. Khunsena earned 10,000 baht, or about $288, per month, according to his contract.

In one of his last calls to his family through Facebook, Khunsena said he had witnessed a fight that resulted in more than one death. He said the body of a crew member who was killed was brought back to the ship and kept in the freezer. When his family pressed for details, Khunsena said he would tell them more later. He added that another Thai crew member who also witnessed the killing had been threatened with death and so he fled the ship while it was still near shore along the Thai coast. Khunsena’s family spoke to Khunsena for the last time on July 22, 2023. (A company official contested this claim and said no such fight happened and added that there was an observer from the Department of Fisheries aboard the vessel, who would have reported such an incident had it happened.)

On July 29, while working in waters near Sri Lanka, Khunsena went overboard, off the stern of the ship. The incident was captured on a ship security camera. A man listed as Khunsena’s employer on his contract named Chaiyapruk Kowikai told Khunsena’s family that he had jumped. The ship’s captain then spent a day unsuccessfully searching the area to rescue him, before returning to fishing, Kowikai said.

The vessel returned to port in Thailand roughly two months later. Police, company and insurance officials eventually concluded that Khunsena’s death was likely a suicide. This claim seemed to be backed up by the onboard footage, which does not show anyone near him when he goes over the side of the boat.

In September, 2024, a reporting team from the Outlaw Ocean Project visited Khunsena’s village. Settled by rice farmers about a century ago, Non Siao is located in Bua Lai District, Nakhon Ratchasima, roughly two hundred miles to the northeast of Bangkok. The reporting team interviewed Khusena’s mother and cousin as well as the local labor inspector, police chief, aid worker and an official from the company that owned the ship. While the police and company officials said the death was likely a suicide, Khusena’s family avidly disagreed. “Why would he jump?” said Palita, Khunsena’s cousin, explaining why she highly doubted that Khusena took his own life. “He didn’t have any problems with anyone.” Sitting on the ground under an overcast sky as she spoke with the reporter in a follow-up conversation by video chat, Palita went silent and looked down at her phone. “He wanted to see me,” added Khusena’s mother, Boonpeng Khunsena, who also doubted his suicide, since he kept saying in calls that he intended to be home by Mother’s Day. His family instead speculated that Khusena had likely witnessed a violent crime and therefore to silence him, he had been coerced to jump overboard.

As is often the case with crimes at sea, where evidence is limited, witnesses are few and frequently unreliable, it is difficult to know whether Khusena died from foul play. Perhaps, as his family speculated in interviews with The Outlaw Ocean Project, he witnessed a violent crime and was then silenced by being ordered to jump overboard. Perhaps, instead, he jumped willingly from the ship, a suicidal gesture likely driven by depression or mental health issues. In either scenario the point remains the same: these distant-water ships are traveling so far from shore that the working and living conditions are brutal and sometimes violent. And these very conditions are likely playing a role in sinister outcomes.

And yet, the human tragedy that criss-crosses this remote patch of high seas is not just tied to fishers. The Saya de Malha Bank has also become a transit route for migrants fleeing Sri Lanka. Since 2016, hundreds of Sri Lankans have attempted to make the perilous journey on fishing boats to the French-administered island of Reunion, in the Indian Ocean, some making the journey directly from Saya de Malha. Those who do succeed in making landfall on Reunion are often repatriated. In one case, on December 7, 2023, a Sri Lankan vessel that had spent the previous three months fishing in Saya de Malha, the Imul-A-0813 KLT, illegally entered the waters around Reunion. The seven crew members were apprehended by local authorities and repatriated to Sri Lanka two weeks later. Joining them on the repatriation flight were crew members of two other Sri Lankan fishing vessels that had previously been detained by Reunion authorities.

With near-shore stocks overfished in Thailand and Sri Lanka, vessel owners send their crews further and further from shore in search of a worthwhile catch. That is what makes the Saya de Malha—far from land, poorly monitored, and with a bountiful ecosystem—such an attractive target. But the fishers forced to work there live a precarious existence, and for some, the long journey to the Saya de Malha is the last they ever take.

Vast and sometimes brutal, the high seas are also a place of aspiration, reinvention and an escape from rules. This is why the oceans have long been a magnet for libertarians hoping to flee governments, taxes and other people by creating their own sovereign micronations in international waters.

The Saya de Malha Bank has been especially attractive for such ambitions. Covered with sea grass and interspersed with small coral reefs, the bank is among the largest submerged ocean plateaus in the world—less than 33 feet deep in some areas. Near the equator, the water temperature at the Saya de Malha varies from 23°C to 28°C, depending on the season. Waves are broken in the shallower areas. But the biggest allure is that the bank is hundreds of miles beyond the jurisdictional reach of any nation’s laws.

On March 9, 1997, an architect named Wolf Hilbertz and a marine biologist named Thomas Goreau sailed to the bank. Launching from Victoria, the capital of the Seychelles, the voyage took 3 days. With solar panels, metal scaffolding and cornerstones, they began constructing their vision for a sovereign micronation that they planned to call Autopia (the place that builds itself).“Having about the size of Belgium, most of Saya lies in international waters, ‘in the high seas’ legally speaking, governed only by the U.N. Law of the Sea,” Hilbertz told Celestopea Times in 2004.

In 2002, the two men returned to the bank in three sailboats with a team of architects, cartographers and marine biologists from several countries to continue building. They intended to erect their dwellings on top of existing coral, reinforcing steel scaffolding using a patented process that Hilbertz had developed called Biorock, a substance formed by the electro-accumulation of materials dissolved in seawater. This involved sinking steel frames into the shallow waters then putting these steel poles under a weak direct electrical current. Little by little, limestone is deposited on the steel poles and at their base, creating an ideal habitat for corals and other shellfish and marine animals.

Rushing because a cyclone was headed their way in a matter of days, the team built in six days a steel structure five by five by two meters high. The structure, located specifically at 9°12′ south latitude and 61°21′ east longitude, was anchored in the seabed and a small battery provided steady charge. In later interviews, Hilbertz, who was a professor at the University of Houston, said he hoped to create building materials with a lower carbon footprint and create a self-sufficient settlement in the sea “that belongs to the residents who live and work there, a living laboratory in which new environmental technologies are developed.” His plans ultimately stalled for lack of funds.

Two decades later, a 58-year-old Italian businessman named Samuele Landi began promoting a new vision for a micronation in the Saya de Malha Bank. He planned to park a massive barge near the seagrass patch far from the reach of extradition and police. “Because the Saya de Malha is not far from the equator, cyclones are born there but they are not so terrible,” Landi said in an interview in a yet-unreleased documentary film by Oswald Horowitz called “The Legend of Landi.” A gifted computer programmer, avid skydiver, and motorcycle racer, Landi had been a man on the lam for roughly a decade. Accused of fraud after his company, Eutelia, declared bankruptcy in 2010, Landi and some of its executives were tried and convicted in Italy. Landi was sentenced in absentia to 14 years, which led him to relocate to Dubai where he dabbled in crypto, hid money in Switzerland, and skated around extradition treaties. While living comfortably in Dubai, he registered companies in bespoke tax-free zones, and eventually procured diplomatic credentials from Liberia, according to a New York Times profile of him.

As he prepared this plan for moving to the Saya de Malha Bank, Landi purchased an initial 800-ton deck barge that he named Aisland. Anchoring it roughly 30 miles off the coast of Dubai, he lived on the vessel with three sailors, a cook and five cats. Aisland’s deck was fitted with six blue shipping containers bolted in place—living quarters, equipped with solar-powered air-conditioners and a desalination system. Landi stayed there for over a year as he raised money to buy another barge twice as large as the Aisland. He even hired an architect named Peter de Vries to help design plans for the re-fit of the new barge so that it could sail to the Saya de Malha Bank and survive there. Landi hoped to eventually expand his Saya de Malha project to create a floating city consisting of about twenty barges, which would, by 2028, house thousands of permanent residents in luxury villas and apartments. Since the area has been known to entice pirates and other sea marauders, Landi also planned to mount a Gatling gun on the Aisland. “That’s one of these guns that fires 1,000 rounds a minute—very heavy-duty stuff,” Peter de Vries said in an interview with the Times. “I actually got the specs for the gun.”

The movement to create sovereign states on the high seas has a colorful history. Typically such projects have been imbued with the view that government was a kind of kryptonite that weakened entrepreneurialism. Many held a highly optimistic outlook on technology and its potential to solve human problems. The founders of these micronations—in the 2000s quite a few dot-com tycoons—were usually men of means, steeped in Ayn Rand and Thomas Hobbes. Conceptualized as self-sufficient, self-governing, sea-bound communities, the vision for these waterborne cities was part libertarian utopia, part billionaire’s playground. Fittingly, they have been called, in more recent years, seasteads, after the homesteads of the American West.

In 2008, these visionaries coalesced around a non-profit organization called The Seasteading Institute. Based in San Francisco, the organization was founded by Patri Friedman, a Google software engineer and grandson of Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist best known for his ideas about the limitations of government. The institute’s primary benefactor was Peter Thiel, a billionaire venture capitalist and the co-founder of PayPal, who put over $1.25 million into the organization and related projects. Where Elon Musk has promoted a vision of fleeing earthly encumberments by colonizing Mars, these libertarians had similar aspirations for the high seas.

Long before the Seasteading Institute, the interest in offshore micronations spurred dozens of daring and often ill-fated schemes. In the early 1970s, a Las Vegas real-estate magnate named Michael Oliver sent barges loaded with sand from Australia to a set of shallow reefs near the island of Tonga in the Pacific Ocean, declaring his creation The Republic of Minerva. Within months, Tonga sent troops to the site to enforce its 12-mile offshore territorial claim, expelling the Minervan occupants and removing their flag—a single torch on a blue background. In 1982, a group of Americans led by Morris C. “Bud” Davis tried to occupy the reefs. Within weeks, they too were forced off by Tongan troops. 

Other projects met a similar fate. In 1968, a wealthy American libertarian named Werner Stiefel attempted to create a floating micronation called Operation Atlantis in international waters near the Bahamas. He bought a large boat and sent it to his presumptive territory. It sank soon thereafter in a hurricane. Another wealthy libertarian, Norman Nixon, raised about $400,000 to create a floating city called the Freedom Ship, a 4,500-foot vessel about four times the length of the Queen Mary 2. The ship was never built. 

Part of the reason these projects failed to get off the drawing board was that the ocean is a far less inviting place than architectural renderings tend to suggest. At sea, there is plenty of wind, wave and solar energy, but building renewable-energy systems that can survive the weather and corrosive seawater is difficult and costly.

On February 2, 2024, Landi and his crew tragically learned this hard lesson. The Aisland was slammed by a rogue wave, which breached the hull, breaking the barge in two. Two members of Landi’s crew survived by clinging onto pieces of wood until a passing vessel rescued them the next day. Landi and the two remaining seafarers died. According to Italian news reports, Landi put out a call for help, but it didn’t come in time. His body was found several days later, when it washed up on the beach about 40 miles up the coastline from Dubai.

For the past decade, the mining industry has argued that the ocean floor is an essential frontier for rare-earth metals needed in the batteries used in cell phones and laptops. As companies eye the best patches of ocean to search for the precious sulfides and nodules, widely dubbed “truffles of the ocean,” the waters near the Saya de Malha Bank have emerged as an attractive target.

Most of the bank is too shallow to be a likely candidate for such mining. But some of the waters surrounding the bank, in particular those outside the seagrass area on the broader Mascarene Plateau, reach depths over 9,000 feet and are well suited for mining. Consequently, several companies have already signed long-term exploration contracts to mine for precious metals including titanium, nickel, and cobalt in these waters.

To vacuum up the treasured nodules requires industrial extraction by massive excavators. Typically 30 times the weight of regular bulldozers, these machines are lifted by cranes over the sides of ships, then lowered miles underwater, where they drive along the seafloor, suctioning up the rocks, crushing them and sending a slurry of pulverized nodules and seabed sediments from between two-and-a-half and four miles undersea through a series of pipes to the vessel above. After separating out the minerals, the mining ships then pipe back overboard the processed waters, sediment, and mining “fines” (small particles of the ground up nodule ore).

In 1987, studies in the Mascarene Basin, an area of the Indian Ocean that includes the Saya de Malha Bank, found deposits possibly containing cobalt over an area of about 4,500 square miles. South Korea holds a contract from the International Seabed Authority (the international agency that regulates seabed mining) to explore hydrothermal vents on the Central Indian Ridge, about 250 miles east of Saya de Malha. This contract began in 2014 and will expire in 2029, and explorations in the area are already underway. India and Germany also hold exploration contracts for an area about 800 miles southeast of the Saya de Malha Bank.

This industry activity on the seafloor will be disastrous for the bank’s ecosystem, according to ocean researchers. Mining and exploration activity will raise sediments from the ocean floor, reducing the seagrass’s access to the sunlight it depends on. Sediment clouds from mining can travel hundreds or even thousands of miles, potentially disrupting the entire mid-water food web and affecting important species such as tuna. The ocean floor is slow to recover from mining activity.

In 2022, scientists dispatched an underwater drone off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina, and found that tracks were still visible from a deep-seabed mining test that had been completed there half a century ago, according to a report by the Post and Courier, a daily newspaper. The areas between the tracks were devoid of fish, sponges, or nodules. Research published in 2023 found that a year after test seabed mining disturbed the ocean floor in Japanese waters, the density of fish, crustaceans, and jellyfish in nearby areas was cut in half.

Proponents of deep seabed mining stress a growing need for these resources. In 2020, the World Bank estimated that the global production of minerals like cobalt and lithium would have to be increased by over 450 percent by 2050 to meet the growing demand for clean energy technology. “It’s a race between countries to overtake one another in emerging and prime technologies,” Arvin Boolell, Mauritius’ former foreign minister, said, adding that with such resources being used up on land, “the seabed is seen as the next frontier.”

However, skeptics of the industry contend that battery technology is changing so quickly that the batteries used now are not going to look like those used in the near future. They also say that companies can rely on recovering and recycling used batteries. Other critics see the mining as a ponzi scheme of sorts that is meant to draw venture capital investment but in fact has little real chance to make money in the long term. These skeptics say that due to the long transport distances and corrosive and unpredictable conditions at sea, the cost of mining nodules offshore will far outstrip the price of doing so on land. Furthermore, many of the largest car and tech companies have publicly stated that they are not interested in minerals from the deep sea. “There is massive investment now being put into developing batteries that don’t use these metals at all.” Better product design, recycling and reuse of metals already in circulation, urban mining, and other ‘circular’ economy initiatives can vastly reduce the need for new sources of metals, said Matthew Gianni, co-founder of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition. 

In July 2024, a group of ocean researchers filed a complaint with the US Securities and Exchange Commission alleging that The Metals Company, the biggest seabed mining stakeholder, had misled investors and regulators. More recently, The Metals Company, has begun pivoting away from an argument about batteries and instead claimed the metals are needed for missiles and military purposes.

Still, the poorer countries nearest to the Saya de Malha Bank continue to weigh their options. In 2021, Mauritius hosted a workshop with the African Union and Norad, the Norwegian agency for developmental cooperation, to look into seabed mining prospects. Government officials in Mauritius and Seychelles have said they’re taking a “precautionary” approach to deep sea mining, but are still moving forward with pursuing resources in their waters despite the warnings of ecological catastrophe. And in September 2024, the countries agreed to a deal to initiate oil exploration in and around the Saya de Malha Bank, a region they jointly manage.

Elsewhere, skepticism about this type of mining has increased. Over thirty countries called for a moratorium or a precautionary pause on deep seabed mining, according to the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, a collective of NGOs and policy institutes that works to counter threats to the deep sea. In 2021, Greenpeace, a member of the conservation coalition, chose the Saya de Malha Bank as the location for the first ever underwater protest of deep seabed mining. 

Shaama Sandooyea, a 24-year-old marine biologist from Mauritius, dove into the bank’s shallow waters with a sign reading “Youth Strike for Climate.” She had a simple point to make; that the pursuit of minerals from the seafloor, without understanding the consequences, was not the route to a green transition. She said: “Seagrasses have been underestimated for a long time now.”

In 2015, an infamously-scofflaw fleet of more than 70 bottom trawlers from Thailand fished in the Saya De Malha Bank. These trawlers dragged their nets over the ocean floor, scooping up brushtooth lizardfish, round scad, sharks, tuna, and other tuna-like species. Their catch would be turned into protein-rich fishmeal that gets fed to chickens, pigs, and aquaculture fish.

The illegal or unregulated behavior of this fleet has since been well documented. At least 30 of them had arrived in the bank after fleeing crackdowns on fishing violations in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, according to a report from Greenpeace. At least 24 of them that fished in the Saya de Malha Bank had committed fishing violations, mostly from a lack of valid fishing-gear licenses, according to a 2016 Thai government report. The Thai government was not yet a member of the Southern Indian Ocean Fisheries Agreement. So, none of the vessels were approved to fish in the bank by the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission—two of the main international oversight bodies meant to protect this area of water. Thailand’s Director-General of the Department of Fisheries later confirmed the vessels were “operating in an area free of regulatory control.”

The impact of the Thai fishmeal fleet was “catastrophic” to the Saya de Malha Bank, according to researchers from Monaco Explorations, who visited the area in 2022 in an expedition partly sponsored by the governments of Seychelles and Mauritius. “It seems remarkable that the Thai government permitted its fishing fleet to commence trawl fishing,” the organization said in their final report. “Even a cursory glance” at the existing literature should have dissuaded any trawling, the researchers added. Citing a 2008 study that said trawling could “irreversibly destroy seagrass and coral biotopes and cause depletion of particular species,” the study also questioned whether the Thai government’s decision to approve trawling was a “case of complete negligence” or a “deliberate policy to trawl the bank prior to joining Southern Indian Ocean Fisheries Agreement.” It is “astonishing” that trawling was still taking place, the researchers concluded. 

The Thai fishmeal trawlers have continued to return annually to the Saya de Malha Bank but typically with fewer vessels than in 2015. In 2023, only two trawlers, the Maneengern 5 and Chokephoemsin 1, were still authorized by the Southern Indian Ocean Fisheries Agreement.

More recently, the bigger fishing presence in the Saya de Malha Bank consists of Taiwanese tuna longliners and Sri Lankan gillnetters. Longliners are vessels that deploy fishing lines, sometimes stretching 40 miles, that are baited at regular intervals. Gillnetters hang wide panels of netting in the water, keeping them attached to the surface via floating lines. 

Over 230 vessels fished in the vicinity of the Saya de Malha Bank between January 2021 and January 2024. Most of these ships (over 100) were from Sri Lanka  and many were gillnetters, according to data from Global Fishing Watch. The second largest group were from Taiwan (over 70). At least 13 of these ships from Taiwan and four from Sri Lanka have been reprimanded by their national authorities for illegal or unregulated fishing, with transgressions including the illegal transport of shark fins or shark carcasses with their fins removed, the falsification of catch reports, and illegal fishing in the waters of countries including Mauritius and Seychelles.

The presence of these ships poses a dire threat to biodiversity in the bank, according to ocean scientists. Jessica Gephart, a fisheries-science professor at the University of Washington, explained that the Saya de Malha Bank is a breeding ground for humpback and blue whales which can be injured or killed by ship collisions. The worry is that fishing vessels may not just cut down the seagrass, warned James Fourqurean, a biology professor at Florida International University. These ships also risk causing turbidity, making the water opaque by stirring up the seafloor, and thereby harming the balance of species and food pyramid.

Aren’t there laws or treaties that protect the Saya de Malha Bank? Not really. International institutions known as regional fisheries-management organizations are supposed to regulate fishing activities in areas of the high seas like the Saya de Malha Bank. They are responsible for establishing binding measures for the conservation and sustainable management of highly migratory fish species. Their roles and jurisdictions vary, but most can impose management measures such as catch limits. These organizations are often criticized by ocean conservationists, however, because their rules only apply to signatory countries and are crafted by consensus, which opens the process to industry influence and political pressure, according to a 2024 Greenpeace report. 

The Saya de Malha, as an archetypal example of these limitations, is governed by the Southern Indian Oceans Fisheries Agreement. Sri Lanka, the home of the bank’s largest fleet, is not a signatory.