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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

by jofer 2y ago

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 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!

jofer 2y ago
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.

by jofer 2y ago

jofer 2y ago

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.