[HN Gopher] Oxygen discovery defies knowledge of the deep ocean
___________________________________________________________________
Oxygen discovery defies knowledge of the deep ocean
Author : cmsefton
Score : 108 points
Date : 2024-07-22 16:48 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.co.uk)
| mentalpiracy wrote:
| drop a few of these into your nearest water-world, wait a few
| years, et voila: your very own sea monkeys.
| adim86 wrote:
| 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
| whalesalad wrote:
| yep, these guys are hell bent on mining everything from the
| seafloor because they think its "free" and inconsequential
| https://metals.co/nodules/
| hammock wrote:
| 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)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33988999
| yellow_postit wrote:
| Last Week Tonight had a deep sea mining operation episode.
|
| https://www.hbo.com/last-week-tonight-with-john-
| oliver/seaso...
| pstuart wrote:
| John Oliver (and crew) is a national treasure.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| 'First thing' ? AFAIK the idea existed looong before this
| recent discovery.
|
| Even if only as a cover story for the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer at first.
| datavirtue wrote:
| I picture these getting strip mined, causing a domino effect
| that results in Ocean death.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| 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?
| bamboozled wrote:
| Yup, we just pretend it's not disgusting and keep
| participating / allow it to continue.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| 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.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > At least capitalism is good at extracting value from the
| pillaging, unlike the alternatives.
|
| Well that's kind of the problem, it's really efficient at
| it and this efficiency is the root of the crisis we're in.
| nilamo wrote:
| 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.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Marx got you covered in _Das Capital_ , this topic is being
| addressed explicitly. Long story short, you're right it's
| not specific to capitalism, capitalism is just the latest
| and most formally structured system to enable this
| fundamental human sin.
|
| What's interesting is that societies are not bounded by
| destructive instincts: over time we've progressed a lot in
| limiting violence between humans. We will never reach a
| state with absolutely zero violence, but northern Europe or
| Canada shows that you can definitely reach levels that are
| incredibly low by human standards.
|
| Now we need to do the same will pillaging and exploitation
| (of both nature and other humans).
| frumper wrote:
| It feels premature to say regions of the world have
| limited violence between humans. People are still alive
| from a time when there was some major European violence.
| jcranmer wrote:
| 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.
| newsbinator wrote:
| > and the first thing people want to do is mine them for profit
|
| The reason we have the technology to discover non-obvious
| things is thanks to thousands of years of profit-seeking.
| Msurrow wrote:
| Its disgusting that every thing always have to be exploited for
| profit. And then companies use part of that money to lobby (ie
| effectively pay off) politicians to let them do it. And it's even
| legal. Simply discussing.
| adrian_b wrote:
| The research paper:
|
| 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.
| buildbot wrote:
| Could a piezoelectric effect be large enough to cause this?
| buildbot wrote:
| 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.
|
| Although, thinking further, ocean pressure is not constant!
| It varies with tides and other events: https://agupubs.online
| library.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.
| notfed wrote:
| In layman's terms: batteries don't last millions of years, so
| wtf?
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| But also: wow, if we could do that at scale the same way,
| free hydrogen!
| from-nibly wrote:
| Lets not forget that the purpose of a lot of environmental
| studies is just to seek regulatory capture. Im not saying every
| time someone says we should take care of our environment we
| should all assume its actually a big corporation preventing
| competitors from finding alternatives bit it does happen.
|
| I had a entomologist friend that pointed out that each little
| body of standing water has dozens of unique species of bugs and
| you can theoretically just say any piece of land needs to be
| conserved because destroying it will destroy an entire species.
|
| Again not saying it would be good or bad to mine this stuff. (On
| first glance it sounds bad to reduce the oxygen we breath). Im
| just saying caution should always be used with this kind of
| stuff.
| yellow_postit wrote:
| There's a work of fiction "Venomous Lumpsucker" that has a near
| future take on building a regulatory industry exactly around
| extinction
|
| I found it to be a fun read
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59593576-venomous-lumpsu...
| kibwen wrote:
| _> 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.
| ics wrote:
| How much for a can of Perri-Air?
| harryvederci wrote:
| Husband of one of the researchers here.
|
| 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.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| > 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.
| harryvederci wrote:
| I understand what you mean and I agree.
|
| 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.
| adonovan wrote:
| Interesting! I found a picture of the glass floats here:
| https://schmidtocean.org/cruise-log-post/anatomy-of-a-lander...
|
| 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/...
| pharos92 wrote:
| "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."
|
| What a sad indictment on modern science.
| mglz wrote:
| 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.
| newsbinator wrote:
| I wonder if, given enough time, these nodules would be the engine
| of the industrialized Octopus civilization.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-07-22 23:08 UTC)