Forty-One Hours in Room C: How the Seabed Deal Was Salvaged at Dawn
A moratorium nobody expected survived the night because three mid-ranking negotiators refused to leave the building. Our correspondent reconstructs the bargaining that redrew the map of the ocean floor.
The coffee ran out at two in the morning, which several delegates would later describe as the turning point. By then the plenary had emptied to nineteen people and a security guard who had begun, politely, to switch off the lights along the corridor.
What survived the night is narrower than campaigners wanted and broader than the mining consortia had budgeted for: a fifteen-year pause on commercial extraction below 1,800 metres, an inspection regime with real teeth, and — the sentence that took eleven hours — a definition of "exploratory" that cannot be stretched to cover a dredge.
The Kiribati delegation had arrived with a single instruction and no fallback. The Norwegian team arrived with four fallbacks and used all of them. Between the two sat a Chilean lawyer who spent most of Thursday refusing to accept the word "reasonable" anywhere in the text.
By dawn there was a document. Whether there is a treaty depends on eleven ratifications, an ocean of implementing regulation, and the patience of governments who have already discovered how much the seabed is worth.