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Dark oxygen made by deep sea 'batteries'
(www.bbc.com)
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this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2024
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What are you taking a test on this?
They are lumps of conductive metals that when touching create a small charge that is able to respond to the charge that is held by water to be able to strip the oxygen atoms off.
It's just a bunch of them in series together finally surpasses the threshold, they just all hold a very weak charge potential individually my comparison to magnets was meant to just imply that they naturally hold a very weak charge that isn't a strong force like a more direct applied method would.
Taking a test lol no, way too old for that. But while these lumps of metal in sea water may generate some electricity, I can’t see them magically lining up in series like in a 9V battery, and below a certain voltage (1.5) there is no electrolysis - not even a little bit. But I have since found the original article and raw data, and it seems the people that wrote it don’t know either exactly how this oxygen is created.
You seem hung up on electricity being a literal function of this here. Expecting them to be a literal battery.
They said they knew how. The nodules have a potential charge, when touching it increases the charge which means it can separate the oxygen. There is already companies that are performing hydrogen separation without electricity on water.
The voltage potential is grabbing at the polar ends with likely a light chemical interaction with the zinc and other volatile metals present.
An exact process might not be here but the function here makes sense as long as you stop looking for direct current.
Edit: also this is not some rapid process this is a slow trickle. Nothing fancy just the physics of the world inspiring entropy.
The reason I questioned the literal battery theory / electrolysis is based on this quote from the BBC article The scientists worked out that the metal nodules are able to make oxygen precisely because they act like batteries. I have since found the original research paper (i linked it elsewhere in this post) which suggests the authors did not actually say that and aren’t sure of the exact mechanism. Your ‘voltage potential grabbing polar ends’ is not one on the known methods of splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen (see wikipedia, which all require electricity, light, radiation or extreme heat. None of which seem to apply here, and the paper also does not mention hydrogen being produced. So maybe there isn’t water being split here by these nodules
The metals are forming a Galvanic cell with the salt water as an electrolyte, the section of the linked article labeled Galvanic corrosion mentions the splitting off of hydrogen in salt water. There is no membrane so electricity just goes through the conductive salt water. The exact voltage depends on which two metals were involved, this page has a table of the voltages in sea water (in mV)