Molycorp.Inc. (fka MCPIQ)

[mick]

Gerard Barron: It does. But it's a beautiful lump of-- lump of nodule. The amazing thing is it's filled with nickel and cobalt and copper and manganese. And that's everything we need to build a battery.

To get the nodules, the crew hoists a three-ton rig called a box core over the side. Plunging into the ocean, it begins its three-mile descent to the sea floor. Hours later, it neared the bottom. It felt like watching a new lunar landing.

And there they were. Giant fields of nodules covering an alien landscape. Millions of years old, the nodules grow by absorbing metals from the seawater, expanding slowly around a core of shell, bone or rock. The potential is staggering, estimates of their worth run from $8 to more than $16 trillion.