This story originally appeared on WIRED Italia and has been translated from Italian.
For more than 10 years, Andrew Sweetman and his colleagues have been studying the ocean floor and its ecosystems, particularly in the Pacificâs Clarion-Clipperton Zone, an area littered with polymetallic nodules. As big as potatoes, these rocks contain valuable metalsâlithium, copper, cobalt, manganese, and nickelâthat are used to make batteries. They are a tempting bounty for deep-sea mining companies, which are developing technologies to bring them to the surface.
The nodules may be a prospective source of battery ingredients, but Sweetman believes they could already be producing something quite different: oxygen. Typically, the element is generated when organisms photosynthesize, but light doesnât reach 4,000 meters below the oceanâs surface. Rather, as Sweetman and his team…
