6 ms·

Oxygen discovery defies knowledge of the deep ocean

194 points by cmsefton 2y ago

harryvederci 2y ago
Husband of one of the researchers here. 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.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  > 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? 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.
  - harryvederci 2y ago
    I understand what you mean and I agree. 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.
- adonovan 2y ago
  Interesting! I found a picture of the glass floats here: https://schmidtocean.org/cruise-log-post/anatomy-of-a-lander/ https://schmidtocean.org/cruise-log-post/anatomy-of-a-lander... 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-tiny-helmets-to-protect-selves-from-their-own-shock-waves 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.html 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-the-sound-channel/ https://shaunmccarthy.wordpress.com/2008/07/13/ww2-secrets-t... https://acousticstoday.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Underwater-Acoustics-A-Brief-Historical-Overview-Through-World-War-II-Thomas-G.-Muir.pdf 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/37/073/37073987.pdf https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...
- Terr_ 2y ago
  > If I recall correctly [...] as much energy released as an atomic bomb. 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.) ____________ 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.
  - ruytlm 2y ago
    Your conclusion of ~3L of gasoline is right, but it looks like you dropped a few zeroes on the way there - your example of 1x1x1m sunk 10km below the surface would be sitting beneath 10,000,000kg of mass, not 10,000kg. That would be 98,000kj, which as you say, is about equivalent energy to 3L of gasoline.
    - janc_ 2y ago
      And for reference: a ultra-tiny tactical nuclear bomb would still be >1 GJ.
pharos92 2y ago
“I first saw this in 2013 - an enormous amount of oxygen being produced at the seafloor in complete darkness,” explains lead researcher Prof Andrew Sweetman from the Scottish Association for Marine Science. “I just ignored it, because I’d been taught - you only get oxygen through photosynthesis." What a sad indictment on modern science.
- mglz 2y ago
  In research you often learn that such totally unexpected, out of place things are often artifacts. Being too quick to get excited about that leads to disappointment and can seriously damage your reputation in the scientific community. It seems terrible, but a dampener on excitement is often needed for focus.
  - OJFord 2y ago
    Q.v. room-temperature super conduction.
newsbinator 2y ago
I wonder if, given enough time, these nodules would be the engine of the industrialized Octopus civilization.
BurningFrog 2y ago
> About half the oxygen we breathe comes from the ocean. 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.
- fsckboy 2y ago
  it gets consumed oxidizing C resulting in CO2, and then that conversion back to O2: takes place about half in the sea, that's what they're talking about, you're not disagreeing except that you don't want them to mention it.
- tim333 2y ago
  More info https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-life/plankton/every-breath-you-take-thank-ocean https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-life/plankton/every-breath-you-ta...
OJFord 2y ago
I refuse to believe this is as little understood as TFA implies. Surely they know the process by which oxygen is being produced, even if it was unexpected to find it there?
GolfPopper 2y ago
Why can't we just respect the Benthic Treaty and leave stuff like this to the Deep Ones?
mlhpdx 2y ago
It seems pretty obvious that messing with a substantial source of oxygen could be far more dangerous to our collective continuity than adding carbon dioxide, or is that not so?
masteruvpuppetz 2y ago
Strip-mining ocean floor is idiotic anyway. Far better to mine asteroids. At least destroy non-essential non-inhabited places duh!!
wcoenen 2y ago
One of the things considered in the paper is that the reaction may be temporary and is triggered by the research itself: 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
phendrenad2 2y ago
Strip-mining the ocean seems like it would necessarily be a horribly inefficient process. I'd be very suspicious of any company that actually tries it.
mentalpiracy 2y ago
drop a few of these into your nearest water-world, wait a few years, et voila: your very own sea monkeys.
adim86 2y ago
I think its crazy that we find a discovery like this in our eco-system that we barely understand and the first thing people want to do is mine them for profit. Like the race to profit with the disregard for consequences is mind-blowing
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- datavirtue 2y ago
  I picture these getting strip mined, causing a domino effect that results in Ocean death.
- unshavedyak 2y ago
  Is it surprising/crazy though? I feel like our entire capitalist mindset is to pillage everything you can stomach and to push your own boundaries because if you don't - someone else will and beat you with their profits. 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?
  - bamboozled 2y ago
    Yup, we just pretend it's not disgusting and keep participating / allow it to continue.
  - shrimp_emoji 2y ago
    It's not just capitalism. The Soviet Union drained the Aral Sea in hopes of irrigating cotton farms and overfished whales whose carcasses went to waste to mindlessly meet quotas. 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.
Msurrow 2y ago
Its disgusting that every thing always have to be exploited for profit. And then companies use part of that money to lobby (ie effectively pay off) politicians to let them do it. And it’s even legal. Simply discussing.
adrian_b 2y ago
The research paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-024-01480-8 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.
- rapjr9 2y ago
  Their sensors have batteries, I would think they'd want to eliminate that power source as a potential cause of oxygen production first. High pressure water has a way of getting into things. Also the sensor devices may have metals in them exposed to the sea water.
  - yencabulator 2y ago
    I assume the same sensor design has been used all over the seabed, and only this area gets this anomalous reading.
- darig 2y ago
  [dead]
- buildbot 2y ago
  Could a piezoelectric effect be large enough to cause this?
from-nibly 2y ago
Lets not forget that the purpose of a lot of environmental studies is just to seek regulatory capture. Im not saying every time someone says we should take care of our environment we should all assume its actually a big corporation preventing competitors from finding alternatives bit it does happen. 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.
- yellow_postit 2y ago
  There’s a work of fiction “Venomous Lumpsucker” that has a near future take on building a regulatory industry exactly around extinction I found it to be a fun read https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59593576-venomous-lumpsucker https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59593576-venomous-lumpsu...
kibwen 2y ago
> Several mining companies have plans to collect these nodules, which marine scientists fear could disrupt the newly discovered process - and damage any marine life that depends on the oxygen they make. If companies could find a way force you to pay for oxygen, every single one of us knows in our hearts that they would.
- ics 2y ago
  How much for a can of Perri-Air?
- fred_is_fred 2y ago
  The plot of Total Recall.

194 points by cmsefton 2y ago

Husband of one of the researchers here. 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.

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
> 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? 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.
- harryvederci 2y ago
  I understand what you mean and I agree. 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.
adonovan 2y ago
Interesting! I found a picture of the glass floats here: https://schmidtocean.org/cruise-log-post/anatomy-of-a-lander/ https://schmidtocean.org/cruise-log-post/anatomy-of-a-lander... 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-tiny-helmets-to-protect-selves-from-their-own-shock-waves 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.html 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-the-sound-channel/ https://shaunmccarthy.wordpress.com/2008/07/13/ww2-secrets-t... https://acousticstoday.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Underwater-Acoustics-A-Brief-Historical-Overview-Through-World-War-II-Thomas-G.-Muir.pdf 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/37/073/37073987.pdf https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...
Terr_ 2y ago
> If I recall correctly [...] as much energy released as an atomic bomb. 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.) ____________ 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.
- ruytlm 2y ago
  Your conclusion of ~3L of gasoline is right, but it looks like you dropped a few zeroes on the way there - your example of 1x1x1m sunk 10km below the surface would be sitting beneath 10,000,000kg of mass, not 10,000kg. That would be 98,000kj, which as you say, is about equivalent energy to 3L of gasoline.
  - janc_ 2y ago
    And for reference: a ultra-tiny tactical nuclear bomb would still be >1 GJ.

pharos92 2y ago

“I first saw this in 2013 - an enormous amount of oxygen being produced at the seafloor in complete darkness,” explains lead researcher Prof Andrew Sweetman from the Scottish Association for Marine Science. “I just ignored it, because I’d been taught - you only get oxygen through photosynthesis." What a sad indictment on modern science.

mglz 2y ago
In research you often learn that such totally unexpected, out of place things are often artifacts. Being too quick to get excited about that leads to disappointment and can seriously damage your reputation in the scientific community. It seems terrible, but a dampener on excitement is often needed for focus.
- OJFord 2y ago
  Q.v. room-temperature super conduction.

newsbinator 2y ago

I wonder if, given enough time, these nodules would be the engine of the industrialized Octopus civilization.

BurningFrog 2y ago

> About half the oxygen we breathe comes from the ocean. 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.

fsckboy 2y ago
it gets consumed oxidizing C resulting in CO2, and then that conversion back to O2: takes place about half in the sea, that's what they're talking about, you're not disagreeing except that you don't want them to mention it.
tim333 2y ago
More info https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-life/plankton/every-breath-you-take-thank-ocean https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-life/plankton/every-breath-you-ta...

OJFord 2y ago

I refuse to believe this is as little understood as TFA implies. Surely they know the process by which oxygen is being produced, even if it was unexpected to find it there?

GolfPopper 2y ago

Why can't we just respect the Benthic Treaty and leave stuff like this to the Deep Ones?

mlhpdx 2y ago

It seems pretty obvious that messing with a substantial source of oxygen could be far more dangerous to our collective continuity than adding carbon dioxide, or is that not so?

masteruvpuppetz 2y ago

Strip-mining ocean floor is idiotic anyway. Far better to mine asteroids. At least destroy non-essential non-inhabited places duh!!

wcoenen 2y ago

One of the things considered in the paper is that the reaction may be temporary and is triggered by the research itself: 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

phendrenad2 2y ago

Strip-mining the ocean seems like it would necessarily be a horribly inefficient process. I'd be very suspicious of any company that actually tries it.

mentalpiracy 2y ago

drop a few of these into your nearest water-world, wait a few years, et voila: your very own sea monkeys.

adim86 2y ago

I think its crazy that we find a discovery like this in our eco-system that we barely understand and the first thing people want to do is mine them for profit. Like the race to profit with the disregard for consequences is mind-blowing

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
datavirtue 2y ago
I picture these getting strip mined, causing a domino effect that results in Ocean death.
unshavedyak 2y ago
Is it surprising/crazy though? I feel like our entire capitalist mindset is to pillage everything you can stomach and to push your own boundaries because if you don't - someone else will and beat you with their profits. 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?
- bamboozled 2y ago
  Yup, we just pretend it's not disgusting and keep participating / allow it to continue.
- shrimp_emoji 2y ago
  It's not just capitalism. The Soviet Union drained the Aral Sea in hopes of irrigating cotton farms and overfished whales whose carcasses went to waste to mindlessly meet quotas. 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.

Msurrow 2y ago

Its disgusting that every thing always have to be exploited for profit. And then companies use part of that money to lobby (ie effectively pay off) politicians to let them do it. And it’s even legal. Simply discussing.

adrian_b 2y ago

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

rapjr9 2y ago
Their sensors have batteries, I would think they'd want to eliminate that power source as a potential cause of oxygen production first. High pressure water has a way of getting into things. Also the sensor devices may have metals in them exposed to the sea water.
- yencabulator 2y ago
  I assume the same sensor design has been used all over the seabed, and only this area gets this anomalous reading.
darig 2y ago
[dead]
buildbot 2y ago
Could a piezoelectric effect be large enough to cause this?

from-nibly 2y ago

Lets not forget that the purpose of a lot of environmental studies is just to seek regulatory capture. Im not saying every time someone says we should take care of our environment we should all assume its actually a big corporation preventing competitors from finding alternatives bit it does happen. 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.

yellow_postit 2y ago
There’s a work of fiction “Venomous Lumpsucker” that has a near future take on building a regulatory industry exactly around extinction I found it to be a fun read https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59593576-venomous-lumpsucker https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59593576-venomous-lumpsu...

kibwen 2y ago

> Several mining companies have plans to collect these nodules, which marine scientists fear could disrupt the newly discovered process - and damage any marine life that depends on the oxygen they make. If companies could find a way force you to pay for oxygen, every single one of us knows in our hearts that they would.

ics 2y ago
How much for a can of Perri-Air?
fred_is_fred 2y ago
The plot of Total Recall.