A chemical reaction could be producing oxygen by splitting water molecules, but its source of energy remains unknown.
"Something is pumping out large amounts of oxygen at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, at depths where a total lack of sunlight makes photosynthesis impossible.
The phenomenon was discovered in a region strewn with ancient, plum-sized formations called polymetallic nodules, which could play a part in the oxygen production by catalysing the splitting of water molecules, researchers suspect. The findings are published in Nature Geoscience1.
“We have another source of oxygen on the planet, other than photosynthesis,” says study co-author Andrew Sweetman, a sea-floor ecologist at the Scottish Association for Marine Science in Oban, UK — although the mechanism behind this oxygen production remains a mystery. The findings could also have implications for understanding how life began, he says, as well as for the possible impact of deep-sea mining in the region."
"As a first test of this hypothesis, the team recreated the conditions found on the sea floor in a laboratory on their ship. They monitored samples collected from the sea floor — which included polymetallic nodules — and saw that the oxygen concentration increased, at least for a while. “They start producing oxygen, up to a point. Then they stop,” says Sweetman — presumably because the energy that drives the splitting of water molecules gets depleted. This leaves the question of where that energy is coming from. If the nodules themselves were acting as batteries — producing energy from a chemical reaction — they would have become depleted long ago.
Electric potential
But the nodules could serve as catalysts, enabling the splitting of water and the formation of molecular oxygen. The researchers measured voltages across the surface of nodules, and found voltage differences of up to 0.95 volts. This is not quite the 1.5 volts needed to split a water molecule, but, in principle, higher voltages could be produced in the same way that battery voltages can be doubled by connecting two batteries in series, (...)."
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