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Sampling the seabed of a mountainous ridge 13,000 feet below the Pacific Ocean’s surface in 2013, scientist Andrew Sweetman saw a reading so surprising it made him think the team’s equipment might be broken. The gear had detected oxygen.
Sweetman and team had been conducting their ship-based fieldwork in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone between Hawaii and Mexico using optical sensors, but they decided to investigate their apparent oxygen sightings further by relying on a different method. Sweetman’s team theorized that the oxygen could be produced by electricity-generating natural mineral deposits that form on the ocean floor and wanted to test that notion through electrochemistry experiments.
“These geobatteries are the basis for a possible explanation of the ocean’s dark oxygen production,” Franz Geiger, another of the researchers, said in a statement.by running water over thin layers of oxidized metals. When Geiger’s team conducted experiments with nodules collected from the ocean floor of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, they recorded voltages of up to 0.95 volts on the surface of single nodules. Clustered together, the nodules produced far greater voltages.
The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has warned that mining seabeds could “result in the destruction of life and the seabed habitat in the mined areas.” The International Seabed Authority, which works to protect the marine environment, has already designated some areas of the Clarion-Clipperton zone to be protected from deep-sea mining.
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