“We would come home and recalibrate the sensors, but, over the course of 10 years, these strange oxygen readings kept showing up.“We decided to take a back-up method that worked differently to the opt...
The researchers wondered if the deep-ocean’s polymetallic nodules generated enough electricity to produce oxygen. This chemical reaction is part of a process called seawater electrolysis, which pulls ...
Amazingly, the team recorded voltages of up to 0.95 volts on the surface of single nodules. And when multiple nodules clustered together, the voltage can be much more significant, just like when batte...
But Geiger looks to mining efforts in the 1980s as a cautionary tale.“In 2016 and 2017, marine biologists visited sites that were mined in the 1980s and found not even bacteria had recovered in mined ...