The sea produces between the oxygen in the atmosphere. All this time scientists believe that this oxygen is produced by sea plants through the process of photosynthesis. But scientists from the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS) have now announced the discovery of oxygen being produced at the bottom of the deep sea without the process of photosynthesis.
According to Prof. Andrew Sweetman who leads the team of scientists at SAMS, he detected the presence of oxygen in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. At first he thought there was an error in the sensor that caused oxygen to be detected at a depth of 4000 meters which was not pitch black. But after many years of getting the same results, he began to feel that there is a process of producing oxygen in the dark (dark oxygen) in the CCZ.
He realized that there are small pieces of rock on the seabed that contain the metals manganese, nickel and cobalt. These are the same metal components needed to make batteries. When this rock was brought up, he realized it worked like a natural battery in seawater. The stones in contact in the cluster were found to produce the same voltage as an AA battery.
The SAMS team of scientists said, this allows the electrolysis process to take place with seawater being dissolved into the basic components of oxygen and hydrogen. This is a discovery that has not been reported before and changes the perception of how oxygen is produced by the sea. Rocks that have been reminded that they do not play any role are actually necessary to supply oxygen to aquatic life on the seabed.
They also found that the seabed areas that were mined to obtain manganese, nickel and cobalt rocks did not recover even though they had not been mined since the 1980s. Without oxygen-producing rocks, it remains a dead area without any aquatic life.
These findings show the dangers of allowing deep sea mining to continue as it clearly impacts existing ecosystems. The manganese, nickel and cobalt rocks scattered on the sea floor take millions of years to reproduce naturally. The study report was published in the journal Nature Geoscience.