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Metals on the seafloor coveted by mining companies can be electrically produced to produce “dark oxygen”, a new study suggests, sparking a debate about the impacts of seafloor commercialisation.
Scientists discovered the gas while exploring more than 4,000 metres below the Pacific Ocean’s ocean floor, an area rich in polymetallic nodules that contain elements used in making electric vehicle batteries and other green energy technologies.
Environmental groups are fighting plans by governments and companies to mine the world’s ocean floor for valuable industrial metals, citing potential negative effects on poorly understood marine ecosystems.
The findings were released as government officials gather in Jamaica to discuss a regulatory framework for deep-sea mining at a conference hosted by the International Seabed Authority, a UN-backed regulatory body.
The discovery of deep sea oxygen must be taken into account when assessing the impacts of proposed mining, Latest Research The findings were published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience.
“This discovery raises a lot of unanswered questions and I think there’s a lot to think about in terms of how we mine these nodules, which are effectively batteries in the rocks,” said Sweetman, who leads the Seafloor Ecology and Biogeochemistry Research Group at the Scottish Institute for Marine Science.
Sweetman and his team made the discovery while surveying the Clarion-Clipperton region of the central Pacific Ocean to assess the possible impacts of mining in the area.
The region’s polymetallic nodules contain large amounts of nickel, manganese, cobalt and copper, metals used in environmentally friendly technologies from power lines to wind turbines.
The researchers were surprised to find that oxygen levels increased within a few days in nearly every experiment.
After conducting laboratory analysis and simulations, the team suggested that the electrical charges associated with the nodules split water into its building blocks, hydrogen and oxygen.
The discovery could add a new dimension to understanding ocean-floor oxygen sources.
It is estimated that the world’s oceans provide about half of the planet’s gas production through organisms that, like those on land, use light to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen through the process of photosynthesis.
The discovery of a possible source of oxygen in an area without sunlight raises intriguing new questions about how life in the ocean began.
The authors were unable to estimate the overall magnitude of the dark oxygen production effect and argued that further research is needed to estimate it.
Proponents of deep-sea mining say the environmental damage caused by lifting ore nodules from the seafloor is insignificant compared with the destruction caused by Indonesia’s onshore nickel mining boom.
Environmental groups counter that there are too many unknown implications to exploiting deep-sea minerals, and new scientific findings highlight the potential for unintended consequences.
