Subnautica devs: write that down!
this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2025
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In the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, researchers found that polymetallic nodules-metal-rich rocks spread across the seafloor-may be creating oxygen in complete darkness. Acting like tiny natural batteries, these nodules split seawater into hydrogen and oxygen through electrochemical reactions, without sunlight or microbes.
This process, now called "dark oxygen," challenges the long-standing idea that oxygen can only be produced through
photosynthesis. It could offer clues about how life began on Earth-and how it might exist on other planets.
This is what they want to strip mine from the ocean floor.
Let's see... we've replaced our forests with gas stations, burnt down the rainforests in favor of monoculture farms, acidified the oceans to kill all the diatoms... I think we've put Earth's oxygen production systems into as much peril as possible.
Billionaires: hold my deep sea mining rig.
The article is focusing on the oxygen being generated, but what about the hydrogen? We've got a budding hydrogen energy industry looking for efficient ways of harvesting it, and we seemingly have this mechanism that can turn sea water into hydrogen without any external power input?
The nodules are basically batteries. There's a reaction at their surface that splits water into oxygen and hydrogen, and also reduces Mn(IV) in the nodules to Mn(III).
At some point the nodules will be "exhausted".
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-024-01480-8
Harvesting them off the deep seafloor en masse to make a bit of hydrogen will be vastly less efficient than just hooking up a solar panel to an electrode inside a water tank.
These were 100% put here by terraforming aliens to seed life.
How does this influence the Drake equation? Previously it was assumed that free oxygen would require life, right?
Oxygen produced at the bottom of the ocean is never going to build up as free oxygen in the atmosphere; too many opportunities for it to be reduced before getting that far.
Ah, makes sense. Thanks.
And trump just signed a new act to allow that saved to be cleaned out.
more like dank oxygen, amiright
Thank god they're gone in 20 years. Those deep sea creatures don't need oxygen anyway.