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Chugging quietly away in the dark depths of Earth's ocean floors, a spontaneous chemical reaction is unobtrusively creating oxygen, all without the involvement of life.Biogeochemist Andrew Sweetman from the Scottish Association for Marine Science and colleagues made the surprising find while measuring seafloor oxygen levels to assess the impacts of deep-sea mining.
pepper the floor. Here, at depths of more than 4,000 meters , oxygen levels slowly but surely keep increasing, the scientists' measurements showed. "We decided to take a back-up method that worked differently to the optode sensors we were using, and when both methods came back with the same result we knew we were onto something ground-breaking and unthought-of."
Scatterings of these nodules carpet vast areas of the ocean's bottom. They're natural deposits of rare-earth metals like cobalt, manganese, and nickel, all jumbled up in a polymetallic mix.The researchers found single polymetallic nodules produced voltages of up to 0.95 V. So when clustered together, like batteries in a series, they can easily reach the 1.
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