Victoria Gill

No, no commercial deep sea mining has actually happened yet. It's not allowed. And for the Clarion Clipperton zone, which is in international waters, a company would need a license from the UN's International Seabed Authority, essentially international permission to mine. No company has that yet. But many people want these metals that are sitting untouched on the seabed.

So this could allow for permits to be issued to mine the seabed in areas that President Trump describes as, I quote, beyond national jurisdiction, that is, outside US waters. The metals company has already spent hundreds of millions developing technology to suck up deep sea nodules and bring them to the surface, and to study the potential impact of mining.

Nodulit tarvitsevat miljoonaa tai enemmän vuotta. Se on professori Lisa Levin. Hän on tutkijana Scripps Institution of Oceanography Kaliforniassa Yhdysvalloissa. Olimme uskoneet, että syvällä maailmalla, jossa on yksinkertaisia vaikeuksia ja täysi taivaus, oli ilman elämää.

Kuukausia tutkimuskysymyksiä, joita joitain on käsitellyt metsäympäristöjen kautta, on nyt näyttänyt, että se ei ole niin. Ja me edelleen oppimme deep oceanin ja siitä, mitä komersiaaliset metsäympäristöt voivat tehdä siihen. Tämä on Michael Clarke, ympäristöntekijä Metals Companyn jälleen.

Michael's point is that we need these resources, and so they should come from a place where they'll cause the least environmental damage, the seafloor rather than the rainforest. Lisa Levin thinks the claim of dark oxygen production is emblematic of just how little we know about how life in the deep ocean actually works.

So let's get back to Andrew's work and to the science. One of the things I want to understand here is whether dark oxygen is actually possible. How could metallic seafloor nodules be producing it? So this is where things get a bit fuzzy. We have not ruled out that there's some sort of microbial process going on.

Or the electrochemical idea. Andrew thinks the nodules themselves might behave like batteries, generating electrical currents that split water into hydrogen and oxygen. That's electrolysis. That's basically when you put a battery into salt water, you start to get bubbles. That's your oxygen and hydrogen being liberated electrically. Andrew says he doesn't know if this might be occurring naturally, or whether it's something to do with the landers themselves stirring up the seabed, triggering some kind of oxygen-making process.

Ja Andrew stressaa, että tämä on kaikki teoreettinen, että hän ei ole vielä työskennellyt, miten vahvaa oksigeni on tuotettu. Mutta se ei ole ottanut kritiikkiä. Monet sääntöjä on nostanut huomioita Andrewin päätöksistä ja hänen kokemuksistaan. Me kysyimme kaksi tutkijaa joiden suurin kritiikki.

Both Per Hall and Angel Cuesta joined a group of scientists, including some from the metals company, to publish a critique of the dark oxygen discovery in a journal called Frontiers in Marine Science. Back on his boat in heavy rain, Andrew Sweetman tells me he has two decades of experience deploying and gathering data all over the world using deep sea landers.

So the criticism hasn't made you doubt yourself? As a scientist you will never be 100% certain, but I'm 99% sure that this is happening. For Daniela de Jonga, who was a key part of Andrew's research team on that all-important 2021 expedition, the challenge of studying the deep ocean can leave any discovery, especially one as extraordinary as dark oxygen, open to being questioned.

Discussion, disagreement, different ideas about how the world works and how to study it, that's part of science. Science strives to be objective. At its best, it's an ideal way of getting at the truth. But in practice, the scientific process is messy and human. Andrew Sweetman's dark oxygen finding could change our understanding of the deep ocean, even influence the decision about whether and how we exploit its resources. Or it could be disproved. So the only answer is to do more science.

Critical experts I've spoken to for this program have said they'd want to see that new science being carried out by someone else. But this summer, Andrew himself is heading back to the same part of the Pacific with even more kit to find some answers in the deep ocean. Do you feel like there's a lot of pressure on this next phase? I'm just trying to compartmentalize, just focus on trying to get to the bottom of it.

With VOA employees being now placed on paid leave for the time being, does that mean that you've stopped broadcasting?

With VOA employees being now placed on paid leave for the time being, does that mean that you've stopped broadcasting?

Fogwater harvesting is what it sounds like, capturing water from clouds of fog. It's already in use and has been for decades, but on a small scale, mainly in rural settings. And it's actually really simple. You hang a fine mesh, usually a plastic mesh sheet, between two poles.

Fogwater harvesting is what it sounds like, capturing water from clouds of fog. It's already in use and has been for decades, but on a small scale, mainly in rural settings. And it's actually really simple. You hang a fine mesh, usually a plastic mesh sheet, between two poles.

The moisture-laden fog cloud passes through the mesh, droplets of water form on it and you collect that, pipe it away and store it. One of the biggest fog harvesting schemes is in Morocco, but it's also in use in coastal Peru, Mexico and Chile, where you get these big Pacific sea fogs that move onto the land. And that's where a group of researchers have been looking at scaling it up in Chile.

The moisture-laden fog cloud passes through the mesh, droplets of water form on it and you collect that, pipe it away and store it. One of the biggest fog harvesting schemes is in Morocco, but it's also in use in coastal Peru, Mexico and Chile, where you get these big Pacific sea fogs that move onto the land. And that's where a group of researchers have been looking at scaling it up in Chile.

They say that large-scale fog harvesting could provide some of the driest cities in the world with drinking water. And they've demonstrated this in a study that's based on Alto Hospicio. That's a city of almost 150,000 people on the edge of the Atacama Desert. Alto Ospicio ist ein besonders besonderer Fall, wenn es um die Bedürfnisse für Wasser geht.

They say that large-scale fog harvesting could provide some of the driest cities in the world with drinking water. And they've demonstrated this in a study that's based on Alto Hospicio. That's a city of almost 150,000 people on the edge of the Atacama Desert. Alto Ospicio ist ein besonders besonderer Fall, wenn es um die Bedürfnisse für Wasser geht.