The Mysterious Discovery of ‘Dark Oxygen’ on the Ocean Floor

This communicative originally appeared connected WIRED Italia and has been translated from Italian.

For much than 10 years, Andrew Sweetman and his colleagues person been studying the water level and its ecosystems, peculiarly successful the Pacific’s Clarion-Clipperton Zone, an country littered with polymetallic nodules. As large arsenic potatoes, these rocks incorporate invaluable metals—lithium, copper, cobalt, manganese, and nickel—that are utilized to marque batteries. They are a tempting bounty for deep-sea mining companies, which are processing technologies to bring them to the surface.

The nodules whitethorn beryllium a prospective root of artillery ingredients, but Sweetman believes they could already beryllium producing thing rather different: oxygen. Typically, the constituent is generated erstwhile organisms photosynthesize, but airy doesn’t scope 4,000 meters beneath the ocean’s surface. Rather, arsenic Sweetman and his squad astatine the Scottish Association for Marine Science suggest successful a caller paper, the nodules could beryllium driving a absorption that produces this “dark” oxygen from seawater.

Sweetman archetypal noticed thing unusual successful 2013. With his team, he'd been moving to measurement oxygen travel successful confined areas wrong nodule-rich areas of the seabed. The travel of oxygen seemed to summation astatine the seafloor, contempt the information that determination were nary photosynthesizing organisms nearby, truthful overmuch truthful that the researchers thought it was an instrumental anomaly.

The aforesaid finding, however, was repeated successful 2021, albeit utilizing a antithetic measurement approach. The scientists were assessing changes successful oxygen levels wrong a benthic chamber, an instrumentality that collects sediment and seawater to make enclosed samples of the seabed environment. The instrumentality allowed them to analyze, among different things, however oxygen was being consumed by microorganisms wrong the illustration environment. Oxygen trapped successful the enclosure should person decreased implicit clip arsenic organisms successful the h2o and sediment consumed it, but it did the opposite: Despite the acheronian conditions preventing immoderate photosynthetic reactions, oxygen levels successful the benthic enclosure increased.

The contented needed to beryllium investigated. First, the squad ascertained with certainty that immoderate microorganisms susceptible of producing oxygen weren’t present. Once they were sure, the scientists hypothesized that polymetallic nodules captured successful the benthic enclosure mightiness beryllium involved. After respective laboratory tests, Sweetman says, they recovered that the nodules enactment similar a geobattery: They make a tiny electrical existent (about 1 volt each) that splits h2o molecules into their 2 components, hydrogen and oxygen, successful a process called electrolysis.

How the nodules nutrient oxygen, however, is not wholly clear: It’s not known what generates the electrical current, whether the absorption is continuous, and crucially, whether the oxygen accumulation is important capable to prolong an ecosystem.

Then there’s an adjacent bigger question: What if the electrolysis induced by the polymetallic nodules was the spark that started beingness connected Earth? According to Sweetman, this is an breathtaking proposal that should beryllium explored further. It mightiness adjacent beryllium imaginable that this could instrumentality spot connected different worlds, and beryllium a imaginable root of alien life.

These possibilities adhd value to the statement that the heavy seabed is simply a delicate situation that needs to beryllium protected from concern exploitation. (There is already a petition, signed by much than 800 marine scientists from 44 antithetic countries, that highlights the broader biology risks of heavy oversea mining and calls for a intermission connected its development.)

But with galore questions unanswered, immoderate are casting uncertainty connected the findings. The biggest criticisms person travel from wrong the seabed-mining world: Patrick Downes of the Metals Company, a seabed-mining institution that works successful heavy water—the aforesaid waters Sweetman studied and that partially funded Sweetman’s research—says the results are the effect of oxygen contamination from extracurricular sources, and that his institution volition soon nutrient a insubstantial refuting the thesis enactment guardant by Sweetman’s group.