Darkness Was Over the Surface of the Deep

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I have no idea what the world's most 'advanced' nation's politicians and 'businessmen' think they are doing (apart from serving Mammon): on the one hand they pay politically-motivated lip-service to the combatting of the effects of human impact on the environment and climate, whilst heading in completely the opposite direction altogether: new oil and gas licenses to all and sundry mega-corps are being strewn about like confetti as we speak. We are making great headway with the development and deployment of renewables, both here in the UK - particularly here in Wales - and around the globe, and the increase in EV sales is encouraging if a tad slow, underpinned by higher retail prices and the lack of a second-hand market. The downside to a lot of green tech, however, is its reliance on some pretty exotic and scarce mineral resources to make a lot of it work efficiently.

Unfortunately, the deep ocean is stuffed with a lot of these facilitating substances, and speculators and mining companies are itching to get their hands on it as soon as possible in the inevitable gold rush that will follow the opening up of the abyssal depths to speculation. But there is a potentially very serious problem here: far from being lifeless, that so-often-imagined totally inhospitable environment of enormous pressure, zero sunlight and no oxygen; apart from offering mineral wealth to those who can afford to mine it; is a source of surprising wealth to not only the other-worldly species that inhabit those depths, but to the rest of us as well.

And so to Dark Oxygen, as promised last night. In a paper published last month in Nature Geoscience, and much reported on over the last few days, a group of scientists detail their studies of electrochemical production of oxygen at the abyssal level of the oceans, where, due to the total lack of light at such depths, the production of oxygen via photosynthetic processes is impossible. And yet, there is oxygen at these depths and flora and fauna that thrive there because of its presence. The oxygen is generated due to a 'battery effect' - the electrolysis of the seawater - created by the presence of certain combinations of metals in the very mineral nodules that speculators are seeking to dredge from the depths in enormous quantities in order to feed the maw of the markets surrounding the technologies and industries that are supposed to be a part of the solution to the climate change problems that we are locked in a death-spiral with. 

Destroy that ecosystem and the symbiotic relationship between its organic and inorganic components, and you threaten the entire ocean's ecology and its thermo and fluid dynamics, resulting in further atmospheric, climatic chaos. Not only that, if that were not enough in itself; to quote the Nature paper: 'Future studies of [dark oxygen production] in the deep sea may also shed light on broader relationships between metal-oxide deposition, biological evolution and the oxygenation of the Earth.' Think about the last phrase of that last sentence very carefully. If we fuck that up we really have lost it. Forever.

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