What is ‘Dark Oxygen’? Scientists have made an unprecedented discovery that could revolutionize our understanding of life on Earth. Researchers have found that metallic minerals on the deep sea floor can produce oxygen in complete darkness, a process that challenges long-held beliefs about the origin of life and the role of photosynthesis.
The discovery was made by an international team including researchers from the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS) and Northwestern University and published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Andrew Sweetman of SAMS discovered “dark oxygen” while conducting ship-based fieldwork in the Pacific Ocean. Franz Geiger of Northwestern led the electrochemistry experiments that potentially explain the discovery, a press release by the Illinois-based university said.
What is dark oxygen?
‘Dark Oxygen’ The Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), which spans 4.5 million square kilometers (1.7 million square miles) in the Pacific Ocean, contains coal-like mineral rocks called polymetallic nodules, which typically contain manganese and iron. Scientists have found that these nodules produce oxygen without the process of photosynthesis.
Minerals producing oxygen in the darkness of the sea floor could potentially change scientists’ view of how life began on planet Earth.
“The second implication of this research is that it potentially sheds light on where life began on the planet. This discovery shows that, perhaps a long time ago, there was another source of oxygen and that aerobic life or oxygen-breathing life could have persisted even before the rise of photosynthesis — and if this is happening on our planet, could it also happen on other planets,”
How did they find dark oxygen?
This discovery comes more than 10 years after the source of dark oxygen was found. The 2013 research mission aimed to understand how much oxygen is consumed by organisms on the CCZ sea floor.
Landers, mechanical platforms that can fall freely to the bottom of the sea floor, were sent down 4,000 meters (13,000 feet) to study how oxygen levels in the water decreased with depth.
The role of polymetallic nodules
Polymetallic nodules, which are naturally occurring mineral masses found on the sea floor, play a key role in this newly discovered process. These nodules, made up of metals such as manganese, iron, cobalt, nickel, copper and lithium, can generate oxygen through electrochemical activity even in the absence of light.
“The polymetallic nodules that produce this oxygen contain metals such as cobalt, nickel, copper, lithium and manganese — all of which are important elements used in batteries,” said study co-author Geiger.
“Many large-scale mining companies now aim to extract these precious elements from the ocean floor at depths of 10,000 to 20,000 feet below the surface. We need to rethink the way we mine these materials, so that we don’t deplete the source of oxygen for life in the deep sea.”
What is the significance of this discovery?
- Science works on the principles of verifiability, so these findings need to be confirmed by other, independent experiments.
- But the research by Sweetman and his team shows that some minerals produce oxygen without using sunlight.
- “The fact that we have another source of oxygen on the planet other than photosynthesis has very profound consequences and implications,” said Nick Owens, director of SAMS.
- According to the researchers behind it, the discovery also highlights the need to protect environments that produce oxygen on their own.
- “To boost the green economy we need to extract metals from land or possibly the deep sea,” said Sweetman. “So what we’ve discovered means that if deep-sea mining goes ahead, we need to think carefully about where that mining should take place because this oxygen is going to be used by the ecosystem in any quantity it produces.”
- Furthermore, the implications of the discovery of another deep-sea source of oxygen production open the door to rethinking how life began on Earth.
“The fact that there is another source of oxygen on the planet besides photosynthesis has extremely serious consequences and implications,” Owens said.
