Dark Breath
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What groundbreaking discovery was made about oxygen production at the abyssal seafloor?
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Back in 2024, on a drizzly summer day, an email landed in my inbox. It was a tip-off about a new study that was about to be published in a big journal. I'm a science journalist. I get sent lots of new research every week. But the subject line grabbed me. It said, evidence of dark oxygen production at the abyssal seafloor. so I opened it and read an extraordinary claim. Oxygen had been discovered two and a half miles down, produced at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, in complete darkness, in a place where it couldn't possibly be made. School science textbooks tell us that oxygen's made by plants in sunlight, and there's no sunlight at the seabed 4,000 metres down. So this was a tantalising claim. If true, it could upend hundreds of years of scientific knowledge.
Everything we know about how oxygen, that vital ingredient for life, is made. So I reported on it. as did much of the world's media. Scientists say they've discovered a source of oxygen deep in the Pacific Ocean that they never knew existed. About half of the oxygen in the air we breathe comes from the seas, and until now it was thought to be made exclusively by marine plants using sunlight. But a year and a half on, some scientists have serious doubts, and I still have so many questions. Top of that list, is dark oxygen real?
No.
So I've come back to it, to investigate. And what I've discovered is much more than an interesting scientific claim. I want to tell you about what I've found. It's a story about a scientific surprise.
You know, this is like someone finding, you know, anti-gravity or it was going to be a very controversial thing to get out there.
A story of swirling controversy.
You don't need to judge whether it's wrong because it's already from the start impossible.
A story that collides head-on with a billion-dollar mission to mine metals in the deep sea.
There's enough, basically, to replace every car on the planet with an electric vehicle at the moment.
It's a row about science that became personal.
We've been called fraudsters. It's harassment. It's vilification.
And a story about how mysterious the deep ocean is. This is Dark Breath. I'm Victoria Gill. I want to start at the beginning. Meet Andrew Sweetman, Professor of Seafloor Ecology. He's the scientist at the centre of all this. I find him in a building packed with deep-sea research equipment at the Scottish Association for Marine Science in Oban, north-west Scotland.
Over here we have two of our 13 deep-ocean landers. These are what are called seafloor respirometers. And this one has just arrived actually.
I'm quite glad that we're in here and not out at sea today because it's pretty wet out there.
Welcome to Scotland in November.
Andrew's deep sea landers are basically autonomous chemistry labs that carry scientific equipment to the seabed. The key bit of equipment on the lander is a chamber that clamps down and encloses a section of the seafloor so that samples and measurements can be taken from inside it. That's what Andrew and his team were using when they first registered a strange signal two and a half miles down on the Pacific seabed back in 2013.
So if we just enclosed ourselves in a glass jar and we put a sensor, we would be able to measure the amount of oxygen consumption you or I was doing, and that's what we were trying to do at the seafloor.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What groundbreaking discovery was made about oxygen production at the abyssal seafloor?
0:00–4:40
2
How does the dark oxygen phenomenon challenge existing scientific knowledge?
4:40–9:59
3
What methods were used to investigate dark oxygen production?
9:59–23:25
4
What are the proposed mechanisms behind dark oxygen production?
23:25–28:01