'Dark oxygen': a deep-sea discovery that has split scientists | Hacker News Reader

'Dark oxygen': a deep-sea discovery that has split scientists

phys.org

142 pointspseudolus108 comments

This is a subject that will likely hinge on politics and commodity markets, but the science is very clear as is occam's razor

1. There is a lot of animal life in the deep ocean where these modules are present and absent where they are not

2. Those organisms depend on oxygen to function

3. Polymetallic nodules taken from the deep ocean have been shown in lab conditions to create enough of an electric charge to split H2O into H2 and O2

4. Areas where polymetallic nodules have been removed decades ago haven't recovered even on a microorganism level

5. These nodules individually take *millions* of years to form

From these conclusions we can safely assume that removing them would decimate these ecosystems on a timescale that's longer than evolution of the genus Homo. Put another way it would be as if we cut down a forest knowing it would take millions of years for individual trees to regrow. It is a crime against the planet to remove these nodules

These nodules aren't even that valuable. It's not like they're full of Platinum group metals...

Privatize profits. Socialize costs.

If you're in international waters, you can destroy whatever you want and even at low marginal return, if you can scale fast enough the total ROI can be good. The solution to pollution is dilution (of regulatory barriers)!

I've been following this for years and am somewhat ambivalent to either outcome.

I feel the need to warn anyone reading that this is an overwrought reaction to an overwrought reaction to a, well, very opinionated take.

There's a reason why there's 5 papers as refutations, and no one will even go on the record, even just for a news article that'll play well to general public grousing, to even devil's advocate for the original paper

I'm glad institutions have and are taking their time with this, to the point we're being steadily brought along, publicly, as we investigate the possibilities and perhaps even discover new things along the way.

Frankly, I don't have a dog in the fight either. I have to wonder if those writing the refutations do.

But frankly, if it is viable, it will be done by one of the majors. Just look at the overfishing problem. Then everyone will just buy from them and ignore the destruction. Like all the other tragedies of the commons, it takes leadership to avoid them (and shame, or at least a desire for truth) that this world does not currently have.

What is the source of the electricity generation? Presumably, given how slowly the nodules form, they must be acting as a catalyst/not be being consumed, so what energy source are they using?

They believe it's due to the metals that make up the nodules creating differences in electrical charge along their surface and perhaps between nodules. For an in depth explanation see below

https://eos.org/articles/metallic-nodules-create-oxygen-in-t...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-024-01480-8

So it appears that the authors actually don't know. Specifically they say:

Whereas questions remain concerning this potential mechanism (such as the identity of the energy source(s), longevity of DOP, catalytic stabilities, electrochemical conditions on exposed versus buried nodules surfaces and the influence of different chemistries within the nodule layers

And after reading their explanation for why they discount microbial sourcing of the oxygen, I am inclined to join other commenters in their skepticism. Given no good mechanistic understanding, I think they are being too quick to rule out microbes. That's not to say that they are wrong, just that I think their current evidence isn't strong enough to support the claims they are making (admittedly this is a completely subjective assessment)

I believe electrolysis occurs between any two metals in a fluid conductor (like salt water). This happens in boats, which is why you put a "sacraficial zinc" on the hull so that your prop and prop shaft and through-hulls don't erode. Maybe this could generate small amounts of O2 at depth, but not a chemist so I don't know.

As you point out, that causes corrosion, using up the metals (well, using up their galvanic potential energy anyways). These nodules are A) extremely old and B) extremely slow growing/generating. If that were the source of the electric fields, it couldn't be sustained long enough to be a stable source and it would result in the nodules corroding away (or at least one of the metals corroding until there was no longer electrochemical potential, which would end the effect).

In other words, for that to be the source, then that would imply that something about our understanding of how these nodules form would be off by many orders of magnitude.

They would have to be forming so quickly, that the concerns about using them up would almost go away (assuming that harvesting didn't disrupt the process of formation that is).

Part of the reason why there is concern here is that these nodules (as we currently understand it) form so slowly (literally millions of years), that if we harvest them, then they are, for all intents and purposes, gone forever. So if they do have important ecological functions, then those functions are completely wiped out.

But if they are actually forming on the order years (and I can't imagine that it could possibly be any slower than that for galvanic/corrosive processes to be the answer, and in fact probably faster), then that concern goes away. Harvest one section of a field, go away for a decade, and it's restored.

How do the nodules form? I'm not sure of the mechanism but I can speculate that it may be that they form as a result of biological action of microorganisms which take in seawater and secrete heavy metals. Colonies of these microorganisms could coalesce to the point where their presence is indicated by the presence of these nodules.

Perhaps using thin sections of the nodules will provide a clue about their origin and whether they are a biological type of sedimentary deposit or something that occurs due to chemical or electrochemical diagenesis of existing sediments or alteration of suspended particulates in the water column.

It's interesting that they are only found in areas where the seafloor is oxygenated according to the EOS article linked and quoted below.

>Nodule provinces are not typically found in low-oxygen areas, she said. “However, there could be microenvironments where oxygen is depleted and dark oxygen production enables certain microbes, protozoa, or fauna.”

If it is being produced down there, something is using it. Everything is part of a cycle and works in concert with all the other parts keep the wheels turning. If we remove enough parts the cycle ends.

I think we need to understand the role these nodules play in their environments before commercial interests start crowing the familiar "national security interests" argument to allow them to bypass any scrutiny.

An interesting side question, but not relevant to the argument.

I was thinking if a log burning is a realer of stored energy these modules might demonstrate the same energy harvesting as plants but on a muncher longer time scale.

Couldn't we re-seed these areas with artificial nodules? Could we seed areas w/o previous nodules to create new areas for undersea life? Is there a project doing this yet?

This is a great question, and I dont understand why it was downvoted.

I don’t think we have a great track record at fully understanding these complex biological systems well enough to engineer life.

you dont really need to understand how something works to know if it works.

theres 8 billion of us because of farming. most of the farmers dont really know how it all works.

woudln't it be cool to make nodules and go drop them in barren parts of the ocean and then they become seeded?

...Ag science is a bloody thing, and if you don't think it takes a lick of knowledge to be a farmer, I welcome you to try being one yourself in order to free yourself of this frankly distateful, nay, disgusting hubris.

I acknowledge that industrial farmers go to university, etc, but of the 8 billion people, most of the farmers probably dont really know whats going on. they just know what to sorta do with the plants.

which was true 10,000 years ago before humans even know what cells or photosynthesis was. people had farms then.

so the point is, even without a genuine understanding, if the causal relationship between seeding parts of the ocean and the desired result is achieved, then an understanding wouldnt be necessary.

Sounds like we need to find a way to recreate these metal rocks in a lab and start seeding parts of the ocean with them.

While I can't vouch for this study's accuracy, deep-sea mining companies will find a way to discredit any research that opposes their interests. Marine ecosystems are already under significant stress, and these mining operations will certainly accelerate the damage that's already happening.

According to the article, this new discovery(?) actually go _against_ their interest.

Either that, or lots of missing links and details...

Indeed which is why they are discrediting it ;)

The company that funded the study are disavowing/discrediting the results.

There isn’t a smoking gun that some specific dire consequence will happen from deep sea mining but it fits with Greenpeace’s argument that we have little understanding of the deep ocean and there could be consequences.

Sure there could be consequences. That literally applies to basically everything. So I don't buy that argument. You really need to quantify in some sense what the consequences could be and how likely they are.

I'll bite...

We've learned a ton in the last few decades about how interconnected and complicated ecosystems can be. Likewise we've learned that the deep ocean isn't disconnected from the surface. The two send resources, energy, and bio mass to each other.

Additionally, we are extremely reliant on the ocean in so many ways and ecological collapse of the ocean would be catastrophic for our planet.

So while yes we don't have a smoking gun that says "deep sea mining is going to destroy the planet" we are being pretty cavalier playing with things we do not understand.

Oke, how do you suppose we do anything then? Humanity doesn't understand the majority of processes we are involved in. If you are arguing for understanding prior to engaging in an activity them we might as well stop modern society.

There’s a huge difference between doing nothing and proceeding with caution. In circumstances where the risk of failure is low, we can afford to take big risks.

However, when the risks are huge, there is a merit to proceeding with caution.

There’s tons of prior art here when it comes to exploring new building materials, new pharmaceuticals, etc…

I agree we should always proceed with caution and that is exactly what I see happening here. Research is ongoing to determine possible effects. Instead of throwing up our hands and disallowing it.

Its very simple. REDUCE the FUCKING SCALE. Until you educate yourself about action and consequences of that action. Examples are very simple:

Everyone bitch about CO2 problem. Oh noes, we produce it so much, planet cannot absorb it... BINGO. If you cannot recycle CO2 itself, leave it to the planet, it does it very well. Unfortunately, humans pushed they industrial operation to the extreme, planet is no longer able to absorb exceed CO2. Cycle is broken, we have a problem.

The shalow thinking of people annoys me a lot. The main driver is greed, not wellbeing of humans (except tiny group of super rich of course).

We are currently in a mass extinction event, Insect populations are dropping like rocks and Ocean currents have been upended.

Modern society is quite literally disrupting these ecosystems, and you're suggesting we should continue fucking around with them before understanding the consequences of our actions?

We don't perform medicine like we did in the 19th century, cutting undesirable people open and seeing what happens, why should we do that on ecosystems when we know better?

I for one would rather the ocean continue to produce oxygen over some owner of a deep sea mining firm get rich.

As I understand it very very likely to cause dead zones. Ignoring the role these nodules play, the way I understand the mining works is it has huge combines crawling the ocean floor and kicking up huge plumes of dust to extract out the nodules. This:

A) kills all marine life that might be present on the ocean floor which is a huge disruption to a fragile ecosystem where everything is even more tightly interconnected

B) disorients and kills marine life in large area through the massive dust clouds that get created by the combined kicking up that dust

The problem with putting the onus on those concerned with this activity is it’s completely backwards. The risk is great enough that we don’t want profit driven activity going full steam to try to manifest those risks first and try to deal with consequences later. There is reasonable concern that this will cause huge disruptions to the ecosystem even before we get to the potential that these modules are why there’s oxygen down there to begin with.

Very little life exists at the ocean floor, since there are very few life sustaining resources there.

That means that killing that life in an area has very little effect of the rest of the ocean eco system.

The mining is a one time event, and once it's completed in an area, life will return, and that eco system will be as it was.

I live in a city. Building it destroyed some wilderness to give half a million people somewhere to live. I think that was a very good thing.

> I live in a city. Building it destroyed some wilderness to give half a million people somewhere to live. I think that was a very good thing.

This is likely going to be the point of disagreement. Depending on where someone falls in the spectrum, their beliefs can range anywhere from humans are bad and should die to protecting and growing human life at all costs.

True. And to me, as a human, the "humans are bad" crowd are an enemy and need to be fought and defeated.

Mostly that crowd is just concerned with humans' tendency to shoot ourselves in the foot when we don't understand something.

There used to be this place called the "fertile crescent" where humans grew a lot of food. But they didn't understand how certain irrigation techniques caused salt to build up in the soil, so they accidentally turned it into a desert.

We don't understand this oxygen source in the deep ocean. It seems likely that we're, again, about to shoot ourselves in the foot.

The belief is not that humans are evil, it's that humans are unskilled in dangerous ways and that it's worth slowing down to cultivating those skills before we cause unnecessary harm to ourselves.

This is more or less my view. However, when I say the "humans are bad" group, I mean the people basing their decisions purely on emotion or virtue and who are usually incapable of coming up with such a nuanced view. The same goes for the other extreme.

So you think certain humans are bad.

Humans aren’t bad in moderation. But 8 billion of us, and growing, consuming ever more resources, are pretty objectively bad.

Not to mention, you could build up instead of out and get more or less the same results with less disruption to natural ecosystems

> Very little life exists at the ocean floor, since there are very few life sustaining resources there.

I think that this isn't true even in light of our current known science; but our understanding of what "life sustaining resources" are is something that can only grow with time—certainly we've often found in the past life in places that we thought were utterly inhospitable to it—and so we cannot meaningfully say that little life exists for this reason. And it can be dangerous to sacrifice life even when we think we understand it very well, unless we are sure that we completely understand its role in the ecosystem, or, rather, how its removal from one part of the ecosystem will affect our part of the ecosystem—which we (almost?) definitely don't.

We've explored the deep ocean. Far from every spot, but enough to know the big picture. There is some life there but not much. Because there is very little resources to sustain life. It's pretty much just whatever scraps fall down from near the surface.

Now, of course mining the sea floor will disrupt the local eco systems. It might take decades or longer for those to heal. To me that's fine in the big picture.

A big exception is underwater volcanoes, which have enormously vibrant eco systems, and may even be where life on Earth originated. This is because the volcanoes supply tons of heat energy and minerals. No one is thinking of mining those.

Either way, this video is quite informative, and doesn't even fully agree with me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFaWgAXax1Q&ab_channel=60Min...

> We've explored the deep ocean. Far from every spot, but enough to know the big picture. There is some life there but not much. Because there is very little resources to sustain life. It's pretty much just whatever scraps fall down from near the surface.

26.1% of the ocean floor is mapped. By comparison, 100% of the Moon surface and 99% of the Mars surface is mapped. Less than 5% of the ocean has actually been seen by humans. I don't know what makes you think we have enough to know the big picture, but to me that seems like a very small portion. And certainly not enough to really understand the lifecycle that's going on down there.

You're technically right, of course.

And one example of your point is when people first took a look at underwater volcanoes a few decades ago and found worlds of life no one had even imagined.

Then again, on a practical level, any ocean floor area humanity might mine would be carefully studied beforehand. That's needed to know where and how to mine, if nothing else.

So I'll claim that anywhere we'd mine we'd have a very good view of what life would be affected how. There could still be a Martian UFO base on the ocean floor 20 miles away, of course, but that wouldn't be affected.

> Then again, on a practical level, any ocean floor area humanity might mine would be carefully studied beforehand. That's needed to know where and how to mine, if nothing else.

And if they discover life you're thinking they'll stop the mining? Or will your next argument be "Oh but actually that's not a lot of life" or "it's OK if that life dies out".

This is a very wise quote that applies to relying on good faith actions:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

From another commentor:

> 1. There is a lot of animal life in the deep ocean where these modules are present and absent where they are not

So it's pretty clear if anything that today we already know these nodules are likely relevant to deep ocean life in some way we don't fully understand yet.

I 100% think the mining should go ahead even if it destroys some life!

Without destroying life we can't even eat. That's an impossible standard. We could have no mines on land either, not to mention cities or farms. When morality becomes a suicide pact, I'm out!

If the mining would destroy a large eco system forever, then I'm OK with not doing it. It's easy to have others than the mining corporation making these decisions. It's not a new problem for undersea mining.

I wanted to give this comment some careful thought. My challenge with your position is that no one, or at least certainly not me, has claimed the standard as negatively impacting any life. The standard is "will this spiral out into an ecological disaster" and right now the evidence suggests that we don't know enough to suggest it won't. If you allow some industrialization, then there's more and more economic pressure to scale it up regardless of the safety impacts.

It's also extremely dramatic to call this a suicide pact. The impact of not mining the sea floor is that we increase mining & pay a little bit more for obtaining these resources in other areas. In fact, if the fears of it severely disrupting ocean life bear out, then indeed this turns out to be a mass suicide pact to kill ourselves to enrich the few who profit off of this.

> It's easy to have others than the mining corporation making these decisions. It's not a new problem for undersea mining.

I think you greatly underestimate the challenge of scaling back industry once it gains economic and political power. If this is a 1T industry and we then find out we're heading for a massive ecological disaster, will we shut down the 1T industry on a dime or try to "mitigate" the fall out? Additionally, the amount of regulatory capture that seems to have happened in the governing body that would be making these decisions suggest that it won't be a measured approach to judging safety and efficacy.

> Very little life exists at the ocean floor, since there are very few life sustaining resources there.

You are making such a confident definitive statement about a part of our earth that is less accessible than outer space. Absence of evidence is decidedly not an evidence of absence here. We barely understand anything about the ocean floor and the deep ocean around it. We should not be going full steam with industrialization until we have a better grasp of how things work there. This is a once way gate where on the other end of it could be the consequential equivalent of just having a nuclear war.

Think about it this way - until recently people believed there was no oxygen in the deep ocean. That’s clearly not true. And they thought there was no life but if I recall correctly there actually is or at least is a good reason to believe there might be and reason to believe it’s critical in the overall cycle supporting all the other life that lives in the deep ocean.

You really don't! If someone wants to try to do a new thing for their own benefit that affects or depends on a shared resource it is their responsibility to establish that it isn't going to fuck us all.

The point is that there is no way to do that. You can only do some research and say probably ya or probably na. I don't think harvesting precious metals is just for someones own benefit. This benefits everyone.

No there are far far more degrees of certainty available to us than just those. How much certainty is appropriate for which decisions is itself part of the domain of expertise here, a matter of research & informed discernment all on its own.

"This benefits everyone" has long been the battle cry of rentseekers and resource overexploiters. It may be technically correct in some narrow dispersed sense but come on. I benefit much more from a functioning ocean ecosystem than I do from a 0.0003% boost to the economy or whatever.

How?

Tragedy of the Commons Ruins Everything Around Me.

How about we apply the same yardsticks to the alleged benefits?

This article is garbage from the get-go.

"long-established view that life was made possible ..."

My understanding is that the consensus view is now that life began either in the deep sea or was transported here from another planet.

My understanding is that tenuous hypotheses are a poor basis for a supposed "consensus".

What we have with origin of life is a bunch of "maybe it worked this way" ideas, with no good way to test them.

The scientific method is based around theories and building consensus. Not sure why you or anyone else would refer to it as "tenuous" unless you haven't been following the research.

They're tenuous because there's very little reason for a skeptical person to believe any of it. It's conjecture piled on conjecture with a lot of handwaving. The fundamental problem of Origin of Life is unsolved.

This is true. Commercial interests have been waiting for the day when they could start mining the seafloors globally for these nodules. I was in college ~40 years ago and it was a topic of discussion back then. The technology to conduct the seafloor mining was not available though everyone knew that the day would come when it became feasible if industry required these minerals. Someone would work on solving the problems of access and recovery. The processing part was already done.

No one wondered how it would disturb the seafloor since so little was known about the deep sea environment back then.

The nodules were going to be the answer to mineral shortages that would naturally occur as you deplete all the economically recoverable deposits in your own country or as deposits in friendly countries become unavailable due to geopolitical changes. Countries that have little mineral wealth of their own but do have a coastline that gives them access to deep water could benefit by opening their offshore areas to seafloor mining.

I think the discovery or the notion that oxygen could be produced in the deep sea by processes acting on or with these nodules is not unusual. Extremophile organisms able to live in anoxic conditions in total darkness on the seafloor should surprise no one. It also should surprise no one that some of the organisms may have evolved to produce oxygen as a by-product of their interaction with mineralized rocks.

It's a big ole beautiful world out there and we don't understand a lot about it. It seems unlikely that in 4.5 billion years nothing has evolved to fill that niche. Personally I think it's bacteria all the way down.

> Commercial interests have been waiting for the day when they could start mining the seafloors globally for these nodules.

For all the folks thinking about Project Azorian[0], I recently read "Blind Man's Bluff"[1] and recommend it for the larger context of oceanic subsurface reconnaissance.

0. https://www.cia.gov/legacy/museum/exhibit/project-azorian/

1. https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Mans-Bluff-Submarine-Espionage/...

Speaking of book recommendations, Pulitzer-winning author Richard Powers wrote a terrific (Booker-nominated) novel about the ocean, "Playground"[0].

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playground_(novel)

You wrote: "No one wondered how it would disturb the seafloor since so little was known about the deep sea environment back then."

The "Sealab 2020" cartoon show had an episode about this in 1972 (so, over 50 years ago): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealab_2020 "7 "Where Dangers Are Many" October 21, 1972 Sealab crew investigates a disturbance to find an automatic bottom-dredging mining operation in their area. The captain of the operation, Samuel Carlson, becomes trapped under his dredge and is rescued by Sealab. While Carlson is decompressing after having received medical attention at Sealab, the crew manage to convince him to allow them 24 hours to demonstrate how to mine less destructively."

Available here: https://archive.org/details/sealab-2020-the-complete-series

Specifically: https://archive.org/download/sealab-2020-the-complete-series...

One issue though: in the episode, the Sealab 2020 crew were worried about damage to sealife as a byproduct of mining. They were OK with removing the nodules if they could be done without causing significant seafloor disturbance. But it sounds like removing the nodules might by itself harm sealife by depriving sealife of oxygen.

Another theme in the episode is the need for a person in the loop to guide the dredging machine to do less damage -- compared to a fully automated system the owner was so proud of investing in. Interesting to think about given the push to AI these days.

I watched Sealab 2020 at the time as a kid and very much enjoyed it and saw these characters as role models. I very much dreamed back then of leading such a lab when 2020 rolled around (like a "Paul" character did in the cartoon). Heartbreaking in 2001 to see "Sealab 2021" make fun of all this hopefulness for the future and the environment -- when I was hoping for a good sequel building on the Sealab 2020 values.

Sadly, my own plans from the 1980s to make Sealab-like habitats in the oceans, in outer space, and elsewhere never got very far (yet):

https://pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

https://pdfernhout.net/sunrise-sustainable-technology-ventur...

https://kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

Thanks for clarifying the state of understanding of seafloor processes back then. Of all the stuff I typed in that post I knew that would be the part that would draw a correction from the crowd. I appreciate your input and now that you remind me, I actually remember watching these Sealab cartoons. A lot of water under my bridge since then.

This might be true if there were any actual deep-sea mining companies. By which I mean companies that actually do deep-sea mining and not just talk about doing it. Second, someone else asserted that the study was funded by one of these "deep sea mining" companies. So who the hell knows?

> This cast doubt on the long-established view that life was made possible when organisms started producing oxygen via photosynthesis, which requires sunlight, about 2.7 billion years ago.

So ... life began because it started producing oxygen via photosynthesis? I think they oopsed the word "multicellular" or "complex". A low-grade article and a long shot of a theory, but maybe not impossible.

Yeah... it seems to me that this kind of circular reasoning has become widely acceptable by people lately, they seem to lack some basic understanding of logic or something.

Sometimes, it works, like when there's a feedback loop and X causes Y which makes X stronger, causing more of Y... but in this case, they're saying "organisms (literally life) started producing oxygen, which originated life". I would agree with you they mean "originated complex life" but they repeat the claim later: "Deep-sea discovery calls into question the origins of life," the Scottish Association for Marine Science said...".

It’s thought that the most common habitable environment in the universe is in underground oceans which are generic in outer solar system and probably interstellar bodies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_oceanography

It’s easy to believe you could get bacteria in that kind of place with an ecosystem like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrothermal_vent

but without energy input from sunlight it is hard to believe you could get more complex organisms or ecosystems, but if you had some oxygen from chemistry that might make a difference.

"but without energy input from sunlight it is hard to believe you could get more complex organisms or ecosystems" Where did you pull this from? Why couldn't complex organisms form without sunlight?

Earth is a glowing ball of magma and semi-liquid stone, with a tiny solid crust where it has cooled off. There is plenty of energy there in heat, nuclear decay, elements that could chemically react and release energy, etc.

On this sun-blasted surface life that uses sunlight can outcompete anything that doesn't use it. But that doesn't mean those other energy sources aren't viable on their own

Some editors want to simplify everything a lot. I can heard the hypothetical editor in this case: "aerobic life" -> "what's aerobic? Too complicated Joe. I'm gonna red-pen it. Write just 'life'. See? Better, right? Now, Joe, does everybody know that organisms are clumps of church organs? Maybe you want to put a footnote somewhere?"

Polymetallic nodules obviously will have electric potentials that could maybe electrolyze water slowly, but... whence the energy? Do the metals in the polymetallic nodules mix better -thus reducing the electric potential- as they electrolyze water? Do they oxidize? If they oxidize, how much of the oxygen they produce goes to oxidizing them, and how much is made available to the local biome?

(When you extract energy from a magnet it loses its magnetization. I imagine something similar must happen here.)

How long does it take for these nodules to form, and how long does it take for any process to render them no longer able to electrolyze water?

I know nothing about the topic, but this comes to mind: the mechanical energy of moving water. When I rub a comb through my hair in low humidity conditions, I can generate sparks. It doesn't seem implausible that water flowing past some alloy might cause some small fraction of H2O rubbing against it to split via some electrical or chemical process.

There's the magnetohydrodynamic effect, which can be used for propulsion[1], guess the reverse should generate electricity?

edit: Hunch correct[2]. Off course requires magnetic field, and while naturally magnetized rocks exist AFAIK, not sure how strong they are.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_drive

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_generator

The Metals Company should have taken the advice of Sir Humphrey Appelby in Yes Minister,

"Minister, two basic rules of government:

Never look into anything you don't have to.

And never set up an enquiry unless you know in advance what its findings will be."

I hate it, that this is likely good advice.

Fiction: an exoplanet research company stumbles upon ruins of an ancient alien civilization, investigates it with profit and power in mind, then accidentally releases some ancient evil that plunges galaxy into war.

Reality: an exoplanet development company stumbles upon ruins of an ancient alien civilization, and quickly paves it over before anyone else notices, because there's nothing worse for a real estate developer than having to wait for a green light from archaeologists.

Plus a strip mall with Waffle Houses and 7-11’s would be the universes best defense anyways!

twist, 30 years later the aliens tunnel up from under the concrete

Building a mall on an alien burial ground site. What could possibly go wrong.

Ah, you want to the Murderbot Diaries. It's got both of those two things in spades.

^ This x1000. Everyone should read those! And the world needs more murderbot.

"As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure."

“I was having an emotion, and I hate that.”

“I liked the imaginary people on the entertainment feed way more than I liked real ones, but you can’t have one without the other.”

More fictional, tortured, powerful robots freed of their Asimovian restraints should opt to fuck off and watch soap operas instead of choosing to take revenge on the humans who so wronged them.

>an exoplanet research company stumbles upon ruins of an ancient alien civilization, investigates it with profit and power in mind, then accidentally releases some ancient evil that plunges galaxy into war

The Protheans warned us. Thats all I'm gonna say on the matter.

I was thinking more of the Shadows of Z'ha'dum - a planet whose name actually sounds like the name of some foreign mall. "Let's all go to Z'ha'dum after school! cheering".

Can't they prove or disprove by just getting some ocean water in a tank, adding those metal balls to it and observing if any oxygen is produced or not?

You have to keep this tank sealed or the water gets slightly oxygenated by contact with air, you have to keep it in the dark and at stable temperature or other reactions could disrupt your experiment. How do you measure the oxygenation without introducing potential error in this context ? You can't just make an instrument appear in the middle of the tank. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29429385

I'm smelling a random junk-science "result", which happens to push a lot of people's buttons:

> The research that gave rise to the dark oxygen discovery was partly funded by a Canadian deep-sea mining business, The Metals Company, that wanted to assess the ecological impact of such exploration.

> It has sharply criticized the study by marine ecologist Andrew Sweetman and his team as plagued by "methodological flaws".

> Michael Clarke, environmental manager at The Metals Company, told AFP that the findings "are more logically attributable to poor scientific technique and shoddy science than a never before observed phenomenon."

EDIT: That is followed by other biting criticisms. The strongest one amounts to: The nodules have been sitting there for millions of years. Any sort of electrochemical process that was actually making oxygen in them would have run out of energy long, long ago.

The worst part of any kind of dredging is that it's effectively done blind. There is no way to know if you're bulldozing a unique ecosystem, an undiscovered species, or a small deep-sea reef. A lot will remain forever undiscovered if we destroy large swaths of the sea bed for some short-term energy needs.

The paper:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-024-01480-8

This is the beginning of the plot in [The Trench](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trench_(novel)). It's unlikely that the rest of the plot will play out, but always interesting when the real world starts connecting with SF.

If so could this be in our future ? It is from 45 years ago, still a good story

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1189676.The_Nitrogen_Fix

Seems these days, we are heading straight into a disaster with no one in power trying to stop it. What is one more path to extinction :)

No it can't. That book is science fiction and not even hard sci-fi.

I'm a marine geophysicist by background, just to give some context on why I'm starting this by griping about journals. Before I start trashing Nature Geoscience, I'd like to point out that this is an open access article and I give the broader Nature organization a lot of credit for their recent moves in that direction.

See https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-024-01480-8 for the paper. It's quite short, and very much a geochemistry and/or geomicrobiology paper, so I am not the best person to really comment on it.

Now for a bit of ragging on the journal... The fact that this is in Nature Geoscience says a lot. I have an abysmally low opinion of that journal after seeing the first crop of papers published in it (it's fairly new). Lots of things that just didn't pass basic sanity checks of "is this physically plausible?". Hopefully it's improved... So far it's been "here's all the wacky crap that got rejected from Nature and couldn't be published in a reputable domain-specific journal".

Right now I treat it as a journal that has no clue how to pick peer reviewers. Therefore, stuff gets published that really shouldn't make it through peer review. While this _probably_ isn't one of those papers, I have trouble trusting Nature Geoscience to have picked relevant reviewers.

Despite having worked a lot on related topics, I don't know enough about deep marine ecosystems to really peel things back. With that said, we know there are plenty of different microorganisms that can produce oxygen in these circumstances. It seems odd to me to dismiss biological production immediately. Even if these samples were fully "poisoned" and that really did kill all microbes, why would electrolysis be the dominant source of oxygen for the entire ecosystem? Microbes are a lot easier to explain... But I am likely missing something critical there.

That's a key part of why I I'm focusing on the journal it's in. Based on previous publications, I have trouble trusting Nature Geoscience to have picked good peer reviewers on this. If it holds up, it should have been in Nature. I suspect it was rejected from Nature for some fairly fundamental reasons and then got through much lighter reivew in Nature Geoscience...

But I hope I'm wrong!

There are a lot of zany ideas that are unlikely but also aren't impossible. Those are pretty common and quite fun. Occasionally, they're correct. Much more frequently, they're not. But they make for a lot of interesting discussion and are incredibly important science. I hope this fits into that category.

I'm sorely tempted to ask a friend of mine who works on these exact types of microbes what she thinks of this... It'll make for an interesting discussion at least!

And with that said, while I'm relatively pro deep sea mining, we simply don't know enough about deep marine ecosystems to balance risks. Every societal action has environmental impacts. You can't avoid them, and your existence in a technological society comes with a ton of deliberate environmental harm. What's important is to properly balance society's needs with the fundamental harm that our society's existence causes. Deep sea mining _could_ be a good way of doing that.

But we can't balance impact when we have so little information about the ecosystems at risk here. We just don't know enough.

Marine science as a whole is very expensive, but desperately needs continued funding and is critical for a variety of reasons. It's often said, but we really do know more about the surface of Mars than we know about the surface of our own planet. We have to keep funding ocean science for a huge variety of reasons.

From TFA:

  This cast doubt on the long-established view that life was
  made possible when organisms started producing oxygen via 
  photosynthesis, which requires sunlight, about 2.7 billion
  years ago.

  "Deep-sea discovery calls into question the origins of 
  life," the Scottish Association for Marine Science said in
  a press release to accompany the publication of the 
  research.

What the heck?! It's like "science" journalists aren't even trying anymore. If you don't understand the topic well enough to spot nonsense like this, you shouldn't be covering science.

Give it 10 years and the companies involved will have pushed so much disinformation suddenly it will be "drill baby drill"...

We all knows how it goes, it won't stop until the planet is destroyed.

Not all risk that can't be quantified is unacceptable.

But we already know strip mining is absolutely horrible on the surface of earth, especially when water is running through the mine tailings, and this would be strip mining while in the water which already makes it worse before we even get to other unknowns. I think the onus should be the people that want to mine to show that it isn't likely to cause problems before they start mining it.

These nodules are so hot right now.

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