Join us on an epic journey from the deepest depths of our ocean – the most uncharted and inaccessible place on our planet – to the future of green energy, and learn how the two are inextricably linked.

Narrated and executive produced by Jason Momoa, and interwoven with awe-inspiring footage of the deep’s most dazzling creatures, Deep Rising illuminates the vital relationship between our ocean’s fragile and mysterious ecosystems, and sustaining all life on Earth.

A riveting tale of geopolitical, corporate and scientific intrigue, the film exposes the inner workings of the International Seabed Authority (ISA): a secretive United Nation instrument which oversees nearly half our planet’s surface on the ocean floor. The ISA is empowered to greenlight the massive extraction of metals from the seabed which are deemed essential by some to fulfill demand for the current electric battery technology.

As extractive conglomerates pivot investments from oil and gas to deep-ocean mining, Deep Rising asks why we don’t instead choose to develop abundant resources to solve our growing energy demands.

Deep Rising reminds us that the seabed is the common heritage of humankind and highlights the urgent need to make the right decision for generations to come.

Over the past decade, I have been telling stories about our changing climate. A few years ago, I launched Anote's Ark and shared with the world the fate of the Republic of Kiribati -– as rising seas threaten the island nation's existence. A month after Anote’s Ark Sundance premiere in 2018, I started developing a new film about the complex issues related to deep-sea mining. I intuitively knew I was committing to a long-lasting project, but I did not realize I was opening a Pandora's box that would reveal one of the most important - and untold - environmental stories of our time.

The fate of our deep ocean is currently being decided by a handful of people pulling the strings behind closed doors and, as the world celebrates our slow transition away from fossil fuels, some major extractive conglomerates are currently diversifying their investments and gearing up to strip mine the deep ocean. They are doing this to secure access to the world's largest deposits of the much-needed metals used in current electric battery chemistry.

However, in order to address the climate crisis, we must protect the biodiversity of our ocean and as humanity is fast-devouring the finite resources of our Blue Planet, we are witnessing the sixth mass extinction before our very eyes.

While the world’s human population represents a miniscule 0.01 percent of all living things, our own body mass consists mostly of the primordial ocean and microbes.

Protecting ocean biodiversity then, is not just about securing the future of turtles, dolphins, whales, and all the other amazing sea life we love and cherish. It is bigger than that. Because the biosphere does not belong to us; we belong to it.

Biodiversity is the infrastructure that supports all forms of life on Earth. If we weighed all the living organisms in the ocean, 90% would be microbes. The uppermost centimeters of the seafloor’s microbial mass is equivalent to approximately 385 billion African elephants. This is astonishing and yet we know almost nothing about this fragile, critical ecosystem contained in the depths of the ocean.

For the last 100 million years, deep down on the ocean floor, deep sea microbes have been slowly interacting with surrounding minerals to create potato-sized polymetallic nodules. These nodules grow slowly, at a rate of just a few centimeters per million years. They are also full of manganese, nickel, copper, and cobalt – valuable metals that we currently need to electrify the world.

All the seafloor beyond national jurisdiction is, by law, the common heritage of humankind. We have a shared moral responsibility to make the right decisions over its future – now and for the generations to come. We are at a critical crossroads: facing the ultimate task of preserving our collective future by engineering an alternative pathway.

The so-called green revolution is still based on a flawed extractive paradigm and Deep Rising is bringing to light the fundamental failure of our capitalist system, by focusing on a very simple and verifiable truth: we have created an infinite-growth model on a finite planet.

Sadly, the current electric revolution is mostly based on inadequate and destructive technologies – so instead of democratizing access to widely-available energy resources such as green hydrogen and new battery chemistries, we are instead repeating a pathway of exploitation and extraction of rare commodities. This business model benefits a select few financially, but has proven in the past to cause great harm to many. And our planet simply cannot sustain such a model.

Ultimately, I want Deep Rising to plant seeds of hope and inspire us by making it clear that a green energy revolution is still within our reach if we are willing to radically put an end to our destructive behaviors and create a truly regenerative economic and social architecture.