NYT story on Chinese making substantial if beginning effort on deep-sea exploration--naturally for mineral resources.
Seabed control!
It'll be interesting to see how hard the Chinese go after this in coming years. I would expect a pretty strong push given the volume requirements.
As for military conflicts stemming from this? Let's just say disrupting seabed control is probably a lot easier and cheaper than you think, so let's remember which economy in this equation is becoming the most resource-dependent on the planet.
Because it ain't America.
A general on this would seem to be: the deeper you go, the more you rely on a peaceful international security environment.