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
These metallic nodules on the bottom of the ocean - and the habitat they create that is teeming with life - are already slated for strip-mining actually. Finding out they are a source of oxygen may save them (or see them destroyed in a different way)
The "advantage" of deep-sea mining is that there are no neighbors to complain about the environmental effects of mining, and--since it's largely proposed in international waters--you get to choose whose environment regulations you follow.
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.
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?
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.
Is it a capitalistic mindset? There have been many civilizations throughout history which pillaged everything they could, and I'm not sure very many were driven by capitalism.
I'm thinking about the ancient Egyptians, Vikings, Huns, etc.
Your salary comes from that. So too is your Internet. Maybe you are being hypocrite? To be human, we destroy. The only way is to die out and let nature take her course. Agent Smith in Matrix said summed it best that we are virus on this planet that need to be eradicated.
I think it's crazy that we keep finding discoveries like this, and yet everyone continues acting and going about their way as if we now know everything.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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:
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Self reply as it’s too late to edit, no, or only once at least - you’d have to cycle the pressure to get a new charge after discharge - which makes sense, you static pressure generation sounds too much like free energy.
> 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.
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.
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
“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."
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.
Readit News
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33988999
https://www.hbo.com/last-week-tonight-with-john-oliver/seaso...
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.
Even if only as a cover story for the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer at first.
The reason we have the technology to discover non-obvious things is thanks to thousands of years of profit-seeking.
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.
I'm thinking about the ancient Egyptians, Vikings, Huns, etc.
Deleted Comment
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.
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.
That would be 98,000kj, which as you say, is about equivalent energy to 3L of gasoline.
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/...
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.
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.
Dead Comment
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.