Polymetallic blobs are producing “dark oxygen” from the depths of the ocean—and no one knows exactly how.
Need a breath of fresh air? Try looking at the bottom of the ocean. A new study suggests that enigmatic little lumps of stuff that litter the seafloor might make their own oxygen in the dark of the deep.
If you can imagine, it's like this long stretch of ocean between Mexico and Hawaii. It’s, uh, basically called the abyssal plain because at the very bottom of the ocean, it’s just a super flat stretch of seabed. And it’s littered with these black rocklike things that kind of look like lumps of charcoal. And they’re called polymetallic nodules.
So scientists are really trying to learn more about these nodules to be able to make informed decisions about whether or not we green light the mining. Back in 2013, there’s this researcher named Andrew Sweetman. This is called dark oxygen. And there's like three different-ish pathways that this can happen, um, chemically in order to make oxygen in microbes without sunlight, and these processes aren't necessarily known for like spewing copious amounts of oxygen into the environment. But it’s certainly possible that it was one of the things that was causing these oxygen levels to rise, even in total darkness.
They tried that was not what was happening And at that point, they kind of were just throwing their hands up in the air and thinking, “Well, let's just get this published. Let's just get this out there. Everyone we tell about it says this is whack”—not a literal quote.Yeah, they basically just wanted this out there. They wanted it published so that they could get more funding to study it further.
So that’s quite a lot. So basically, when they found that there was this pretty substantial charge, that became their main hypothesis: seawater electrolysis. They think that these natural batteries are separating the seawater into hydrogen and oxygen. The big, important caveat here is that we don’t actually know if this is what is happening on the undisturbed seafloor.So one of the researchers, co-authors, Franz Geiger, he’s a physical chemist at Northwestern University.
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