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The ocean floor is covered in naturally-occurring batteries that make oxygen
This has HUGE implications for life on icy moons. Interesting New Paper #3...
A truly extraordinary paper has just been published in Nature Geoscience: “Evidence of dark oxygen production at the abyssal seafloor,” by those doughty warriors for truth (…deep breath… people who put all that work in deserve to have their names mentioned when that work is being discussed… OK, here we go…) Andrew K. Sweetman, Alycia J. Smith, Danielle S. W. de Jonge, Tobias Hahn, Peter Schroedl, Michael Silverstein, Claire Andrade, R. Lawrence Edwards, Alastair J. M. Lough, Clare Woulds, William B. Homoky, Andrea Koschinsky, Sebastian Fuchs, Thomas Kuhn, Franz Geiger& Jeffrey J. Marlow. And I think you're going to see this even more in the case of icy moons: deep under their frozen crust, in their liquid water oceans, the geosphere is going to enable the biosphere, in ways that will surprise those scientists who are not expecting a system fine-tuned (by evolution at the level of universes) for the production of life. The same sea floor volcanic vents that melt the ice to make those liquid water oceans will also provide the manganese, iron, cobalt, nickel, et cetera, that these nodules require.
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