Professor Andrew K Sweetman (official pic)
Have you ever heard of Dark Oxygen? Probably not! The very existence of dark oxygen raises questions about the origins of life and the potential for life to exist in environments previously thought to be inhospitable. Now, a team of scientists from the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS) in Oban led by Prof. Andrew Sweetman made a ‘dark oxygen’ discovery while on ship-based fieldwork in the Pacific Ocean.
The discovery was made while sampling the seabed of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone to assess the possible impacts of deep-sea mining. This process would extract polymetallic nodules that contain metals such as manganese, nickel and cobalt, which are required to produce lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles and mobile phones.
Dark oxygen is a groundbreaking discovery that has challenged our understanding of oxygen production. Unlike the oxygen we’re familiar with, which is primarily produced by photosynthesis, dark oxygen is generated in the deep ocean, far from sunlight, through a completely different process.
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Recent research has revealed that polymetallic nodules, potato-sized lumps of minerals found on the seabed, are responsible for producing dark oxygen. These nodules, rich in metals like cobalt, nickel, copper, and manganese, undergo a chemical reaction that releases oxygen.
In the experiments, Prof Sweetman and colleagues found nodules to be carrying a very high electric charge, which could lead to the splitting of seawater into hydrogen and oxygen in a process called seawater electrolysis. Only a voltage of 1.5 V is needed for seawater electrolysis to occur – the same voltage as a typical AA battery. The team analysed multiple nodules and recorded readings of up to 0.95 volts on the surfaces of some, meaning that significant voltages can occur when the nodules are clustered together.
“For aerobic life to begin on the planet, there had to be oxygen and our understanding has been that Earth’s oxygen supply began with photosynthetic organisms,” said Prof. Sweetman. “But we now know that there is oxygen produced in the deep sea, where there is no light. I think we therefore need to revisit questions like: where could aerobic life have begun?”
“Through this discovery, we have generated many unanswered questions and I think we have a lot to think about in terms of how we mine these nodules, which are effectively batteries in a rock,” he added. “When we first got this data, we thought the sensors were faulty, because every study ever done in the deep sea has only seen oxygen being consumed rather than produced. We would come home and recalibrate the sensors but over the course of 10 years, these strange oxygen readings kept showing up.”
“We decided to take a back-up method that worked differently to the optode sensors we were using and when both methods came back with the same result we knew we were onto something ground-breaking and unthought-of.”
