In 2024, researchers reported something that should have been impossible: metallic nodules scattered across the deep Pacific seafloor appeared to be producing oxygen in total darkness, creating “dark oxygen” without a single ray of sunlight. - Space Daily

The deep ocean is usually treated as the end of the oxygen story. Sunlit organisms near the surface make oxygen through photosynthesis, currents carry some of it downward, and life on the abyssal seafloor slowly consumes it. That is why a 2024 Nature Geoscien…