Oxygen discovery defies knowledge of the deep ocean
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
https://www.hbo.com/last-week-tonight-with-john-oliver/seaso...
Even if only as a cover story for the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer at first.
It always feels like a morality race to the bottom. Clearly i'm a pessimist here, but it's obvious in my pessimistic mindset. Do you have a more positive outlook perhaps?
At least capitalism is good at extracting value from the pillaging, unlike the alternatives.
But, in the end, pillaging is inevitable. Thermodynamically, "there's stuff already there, and all we have to do is get it" is the simple sugar of industry. You'll never find easier Calories. It's too sweet to resist. That's how you end up in oxymoronic schemes like "biomass" (cutting down forests) in the pursuit of renewable energy.
Well that's kind of the problem, it's really efficient at it and this efficiency is the root of the crisis we're in.
Definitely, but i didn't imply it was just capitalism.
If it is as dire as you portray, i guess my pessimism is correct. We're doomed and we'll all race to the finish line.
I'm thinking about the ancient Egyptians, Vikings, Huns, etc.
What's interesting is that societies are not bounded by destructive instincts: over time we've progressed a lot in limiting violence between humans. We will never reach a state with absolutely zero violence, but northern Europe or Canada shows that you can definitely reach levels that are incredibly low by human standards.
Now we need to do the same will pillaging and exploitation (of both nature and other humans).
Incredible to see how the nuclear bomb and welfare state were able to perform such an incredible feat.
More on point, it is absolutely critical that we self-regulate, because if we fail to do so, eventually, nature WILL regulate us into oblivion. Our existence depends on an insanely complex web of life. As with any robust network, many nodes and connections can be damaged and the system will still work. But keep damaging nodes and connections, and eventually, the system cannot recover — it will break down and may die off completely. When that happens, no human technology will save our species.
And the self-regulation is happening. We may very well be on a path where improving technology gets us through to a far less destructive life mode. More education, security, and rights causes birth rates to decline. Sustainable energy production is now cheaper than digging up fossil fuels, transporting them across the globe and lighting them on fire. Lighting is 10X more efficient, etc. etc. etc.. Intentional efforts to save species and ecosystems often see them recover faster than expected.
The only question is whether we have the luck and political will to make this transition happen fast enough to get to a sustainable energy & materials economy before a critical collapse.
I think there's a middle ground where you acknowledge there's a problem, try in some part to mitigate your contribution and build the world you want to be.
We don't have to be all-in on sweatshops and environmental destruction just because we in some part contribute to the problem as well.
The disadvantages are more numerous: the commercial viability of the extracted ore is extremely unclear; the seafloor is very poorly mapped, and with poor visibility, you could easily drive a seafloor rover into or over a cliff without seeing it; environmental effects are largely unknown [1]; the international authority meant to help guide these efforts has put a moratorium on it until these questions can be answered (which, given how long it's taking to answer them, has led many companies interesting in deep sea mining to advocate for ignoring it entirely).
[1] Although anyone who's had much of a thought about it would probably hazard that "insanely destructive" is the most likely outcome. Still an open question if deep sea mining is less or more destructive than our current mining techniques.
The reason we have the technology to discover non-obvious things is thanks to thousands of years of profit-seeking.
The world's an incredibly complex place. Who's to say the consequences of harvesting these nodules are necessarily negative? If we're just finding out new details about them, how can you possibly assume you know how removing them will affect the environment?
Epistemologically speaking, we know very little, while we erroneously believe ourselves to know all.
Kind of like how so many will assert with unshakable confidence that human activities are causatively responsible for the bulk of climate change, when we don't even have an exhaustive list of the factors influencing it, let alone the ability to study whether the observed associations are merely correlated or causative (you need to isolate all confounding variables and have robust experiment design, including controls, to establish causality).
We don't even have true mastery over human-made systems (Rowhammer, speculative execution attacks were possible for many years before any human brain had ever conveived of such a possibility), how can anyone possibly have enough intellectual arrogance to assume we understand how human activity will affect ecosystems we barely even know about the existence of?
And to be clear - I'm not arguing that companies should be allowed to start harvesting these, nor am I arguing that human activity is not the primary contributing factor to climate change - just pointing out the juxtaposition between the immense cognitive hubris and the infinite scope of how much about reality we don't even begin to have an understanding of.
Some points I would argue are that our education system is gravely flawed, our understanding of the world is dangerously shallow, and the level of self-awareness that we, collectively, as a species, have about these shortcomings of ours is dangerously low.
We ought to be ceasing much of what we waste our time with and figuring out ways to organize society to perform much more robust research, not confidently making knee-jerk assertions about the impacts of proposed activity we've never studied in an ecosystem we've barely even seen, let alone studied. That includes assertions both supporting and opposing such activity.
It’s ok to err on the side of caution, because as you point out, we’re nowhere near being able to holistically understand these complex systems.
Yes, it would be better to completely understand the problem before digging in, but that’s not near term, but the destruction of this habitat is.
If companies could find a way force you to pay for oxygen, every single one of us knows in our hearts that they would.
These scientific cruises are a huge undertaking, and the fact that the team managed to do this during Covid was an achievement by itself. Shipping containers filled with obscure tech to a different country that you'll then send to the bottom of the ocean will surely raise eyebrows at customs. Then there was the self-isolating, and working in shifts so different teams can do different kinds of lander deployments (and pick them back up), etc. Incredible!
Some of the tech that's put on these kinds of research ships is pretty crazy, too. For example, they put spherical glass floats on landers that go to the bottom of the ocean[0]. Weights pull the lander down, and when the lander receives a signal it detaches the weights[1] so the floats pull it back up. These glass floats are pretty big and need to be able to resist a huge amount of pressure at depths of multiple kilometers. If I recall correctly, if one of these spheres breaks, due to the pressure, the collapse of the water on all sides of the sphere results in as much energy released as an atomic bomb.
As to this research: the researchers initially weren't too happy to find this. First they doubted if it was correct, but it's actually worse when you find out it is in fact correct but it goes against everything in biology books: how the hell are you going to explain this to people?
[0] I'm not sure if a lander like that was used in this research btw, it's just an example that I found interesting.
[1] One time, I think on a different cruise, researchers didn't have enough weights to do an extra deployment, so they got weights from the gym on the ship and put them on the lander. There's a whole bunch of these kinds of interesting/funny stories in different fields of science, could be nice if someone were to collect them somewhere.
Maybe it's just a cultural difference between biology and physics, but don't they build those huge supercolliders because they're hoping to find something that they can't explain? The more theory you can destroy with evidence the better... or so I thought.
The difference here is that they were not looking for something crazy, they just wanted to measure things to enable policy makers to make a well-informed decision. Then you unexpectedly find something crazy, and you don't have a clear answer right away.
Imagine being the first person to spot a black swan, and you happen to be a biologist, but your research didn't have anything to do with birds. That's a pretty big derail, and I don't think every scientist would be happy in that scenario.
BTW I doubt the energy yield of an imploding sphere is anywhere close to a nuclear device, but implosion is a very rapid process, so its power output is indeed very high. Examples:
- Pistol shrimps create cavities whose collapse emits light. https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/07/pistol-shrimp-sport-...
- A Super-Kamiokande PMT implosion triggers a chain reaction. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Particles/kamio.h...
- Downed WWII aircraft dropped hollow spheres into the ocean whose implosion, heard thousands of miles away, signalled their position https://shaunmccarthy.wordpress.com/2008/07/13/ww2-secrets-t... https://acousticstoday.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Underw...
Also, imploding spheres have been used as a proxy for nuclear detonations in calibration experiments for sound-based nuclear blast detection: https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...
That can't be true, but perhaps you saw something about temperatures which resembled those from a nuclear-bomb instead? (The key being that much much less mass is getting heated, and stays that way for a much shorter time.)
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One quick set of reasoning is this: Energy cannot be created or destroyed, and there's no reason to think the popping-bubble is causing seawater to undergo nuclear fusion, so the limit is whatever it takes for someone to repeatably set up the situation. (So basically the energy to dropping ballast-and-bubble to the bottom of the sea, popping the bubble, and then pulling the ballast back up.) Tedious, but hardly nuclear-bomb territory.
A second approach is to imagine the collapse as a giant column of water falling like weight into the gap. Imagine a magic-glass box 1x1x1 meter holding a vacuum, sunk 10km below the surface. That's 10,000 m^3 of water and roughly ~10,000kg of mass poised to fall 1m. Gravitational potential energy: ~98 kilojoules.
For comparison, that's the energy of ~3 liters of gasoline, although getting it to explode in a similarly-simultaneous way would be tricky. (Power = Energy / Time.) In contrast, the Hiroshima explosion was ~63 terajoules.
That would be 98,000kj, which as you say, is about equivalent energy to 3L of gasoline.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-024-01480-8
TLDR:
They have found evidence of elemental oxygen production in a polymetallic nodule-covered abyssal seafloor in the Pacific Ocean.
However, for now they have identified neither how the dioxygen is produced nor which is the source of energy for this.
Their hypothesis for how the dioxygen is produced is that there may be a redox reaction between some metals in the polymetallic nodules, which might cause an electric current that could electrolyze the water.
However this hypothesis has very little value until an energy source is identified for it.
The voltage in a battery is not produced between metals in any state, but only between an oxidized metal and a reduced metal. The simplest batteries, like the AA or AAA batteries with saline or alkaline electrolyte, produce voltage by the reaction between reduced zinc and oxidized manganese.
So for a natural battery to form in those polymetallic nodules, some of the metals must be in a reduced state, and for them to be reduced, somewhere there should have been an energy source to provide energy for their reduction.
That must be determined to understand what happens.
Although, thinking further, ocean pressure is not constant! It varies with tides and other events: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201...
So no free energy issue, there could actually be some cycling effect due to the energy input from the sun/moon shifting tides.
I don't even know what this means. The oxygen we breathe has been on the planet for 4+ billion years. We breathe it again and again and again. It's not being produced or consumed in any meaningful sense.
It does get converted between O₂ and CO₂ by a number of processes, but this framing tries to scare the readers to think mining will start slowly suffocating them.
Assuming the ‘geo-battery’ is partly responsible for the DOP observed, the initial high DOP rate may have been related to the ‘bow-wave’ of the lander removing sediments from the surface of the nodules and exposing electrochemically active sites on the nodules
What a sad indictment on modern science.
It seems terrible, but a dampener on excitement is often needed for focus.
Far better to mine asteroids. At least destroy non-essential non-inhabited places duh!!
I had a entomologist friend that pointed out that each little body of standing water has dozens of unique species of bugs and you can theoretically just say any piece of land needs to be conserved because destroying it will destroy an entire species.
Again not saying it would be good or bad to mine this stuff. (On first glance it sounds bad to reduce the oxygen we breath). Im just saying caution should always be used with this kind of stuff.
I found it to be a fun read
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59593576-venomous-lumpsu...