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“Thousands of Giant Eggs Found”: #UnderwaterVolcano Unleashes Terrifying Discovery That Has Marine Scientists in Total Shock

An unprecedented discovery off the coast of Vancouver Island has unveiled thousands of giant eggs nestled within an active underwater volcano, offering new insights into the mysterious life cycles of #DeepSeaCreatures and the critical role volcanic habitats play in #MarineBiodiversity.

Gabriel Cruz June 29, 2025

Excerpt: "The active underwater volcano near Vancouver Island serves as a natural laboratory for studying the complexities of marine ecosystems. The #geothermal warmth supports a unique# biodiversity, offering scientists a rare opportunity to explore how these environments affect marine life development. The discovery of giant eggs in this volcanic setting suggests that underwater volcanic activity may have a more significant impact on marine life cycles than previously thought.

"A follow-up expedition in 2023 witnessed a #PacificWhiteSkate laying an egg at the site, providing valuable insights into the reproductive behaviors of this mysterious species. The presence of multiple species utilizing the volcano as a nursery underscores the broader ecological significance of these habitats. This finding emphasizes the need for ongoing research to better understand the intricate dynamics of ocean ecosystems and their inhabitants."

sustainability-times.com/resea

#LeaveItInTheOcean #DeepSeaMining
#NoDeepSeaMining #RecycleCopper
#LifeOnEarth #Ecocide #DeepSeaLife #OceansAreLife #PlanetDestroyers #HumanGreed

Sustainability Times · “Thousands of Giant Eggs Found”: Underwater Volcano Unleashes Terrifying Discovery That Has Marine Scientists in Total Shock - Sustainability TimesIN A NUTSHELL 🌋 An active underwater volcano near Vancouver Island revealed thousands of giant eggs from the elusive Pacific white skate. 🔥 The volcanic warmth acts as a natural incubator, speeding up the four-year gestation period of these massive eggs. 🐟 Adult Pacific white skates grow up to 6.5 feet long, highlighting their adaptation

#SodiumBatteries offer an alternative to tricky #lithium

Lithium is relatively scarce and mostly refined in China. Sodium is neither

Oct 26th 2023

Excerpt: "Fortunately, lithium is not the only game in town. As we report this week, a clutch of firms are making batteries based on sodium, lithium’s elemental cousin. Since sodium’s chemical properties are very similar to those of lithium, it too makes for good batteries. And sodium, which is found in the salt in seawater, is thousands of times more abundant on Earth than lithium and cheaper to get at. Most of the companies using sodium to make batteries today are also Chinese. But pursuing the technology in the West might be a surer route to energy security than relying heavily on lithium.

"Besides its abundance, sodium has other advantages. The best lithium batteries use #cobalt and 3nickel in their electrodes. Nickel, like lithium, is in short supply. #Mining it on land is #environmentally destructive. Proposals to grab it from the #seabed instead have caused rows. A good deal of the world’s cobalt, meanwhile, is extracted from small mines in the Democratic Republic of #Congo, where child labour is common and working conditions are dire. Sodium batteries, by contrast, can use electrodes built from iron and manganese, which are plentiful and uncontroversial. Since the chemical components are cheap, a scaled-up industry should be able to produce batteries that cost less than their lithium counterparts.

"Sodium is not a perfect replacement for lithium. It is heavier, meaning sodium batteries will weigh more than lithium ones of an equivalent capacity. That is likely to rule them out in some cases where lightness is paramount. But for other applications, such as grid storage or home batteries, weight is irrelevant. Several Chinese carmakers are even beginning to put sodium batteries in electric vehicles.

"Perhaps the biggest disadvantage of sodium batteries is their late start. #LithiumIon batteries were first commercialised in the 1990s and have benefited from decades of investment. But the rest of the world is behind China on both fronts anyway. America and the European Union have announced enormous programmes of green industrial subsidies. If they are determined to bankroll batteries, some of the pot should go to sodium."

Read more:
economist.com/leaders/2023/10/

Archived version:
archive.ph/7x6JX#

The Economist · Sodium batteries offer an alternative to tricky lithiumBy The Economist

As #Norway Considers #DeepSeaMining, a Rich History of Ocean Conservation Decisions May Inform How the Country Acts

In the past, scientists, industry and government have worked together in surprising, tense and fruitful ways

by Christian Elliott, April 21, 2025

"At the #Arctic #MidOceanRidge off the Norwegian coast, molten rock rises from deep within the Earth between spreading tectonic plates. Black smoker vents sustain unique ecosystems in the dark. Endemic species of long, segmented bristle worms and tiny crustaceans graze on bacteria mats and flit among fields of chemosynthetic tube worms, growing thick as grass. Dense banks of sponges cling to the summits and slopes of underwater mountains. And among all this life, minerals build up slowly over millennia in the form of #sulfide deposits and #manganese crusts.

"Those minerals are the kind needed to fuel the global green energy transition—#copper, #zinc and #cobalt. In January 2024, Norway surprised the world with the announcement it planned to open its waters for exploratory deep-sea mining, the first nation to do so. If all went to plan, companies would be issued licenses to begin identifying mineral deposits as soon as #Spring2025. To some scientists who’d spent decades mapping and studying the geology and ecology of the Norwegian seabed and Arctic Mid-Ocean Ridge, the decision seemed premature—they still lacked critical data on the area targeted for mining. The government’s own Institute of Marine Research (IMR) accused it of extrapolating from a small area where data has already been collected to the much larger zone now targeted

“ 'Our advice has been we don’t have enough knowledge,' says Rebecca Ross, an #ecologist at IMR who works on Norway’s #Mareano deep-sea mapping initiative. She says the decision was based solely on the #geology of the area. Taking high-resolution scans of the seabed and sampling its geology is the first step when research ships enter a new area, but critical biological and ecological research is more difficult and tends to come later—which is the case on the ridge area targeted for mining. Ross says it’s certain that area contains vulnerable marine ecosystems that would be affected by the light and noise pollution and sediment plumes generated by mining. The IMR estimates closing the knowledge gap on the target area could take ten years.

"The same conflict, with a partial scientific understanding misinterpreted and used to justify resource extraction, is playing out in the #Pacific, where mining pilot projects are already underway in international waters. Years before, scientists funded by industry scouted the #seabed there, discovering both valuable minerals and new forms of life."

Read more:
smithsonianmag.com/science-nat

#Oxygen produced in the #DeepSea raises questions about extraterrestrial life

"Over 12,000 feet below the surface of the sea, in a region of the Pacific Ocean known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (#CCZ), million-year-old rocks cover the seafloor. These rocks may seem lifeless, but nestled between the nooks and crannies on their surfaces, tiny sea creatures and microbes make their home, many uniquely adapted to life in the dark.

"These deep-sea rocks, called polymetallic #nodules, don't only host a surprising number of sea critters. A team of scientists that includes Boston University experts has discovered they also produce oxygen on the seafloor.

"The discovery is a surprise considering oxygen is typically created by plants and organisms with help from the sun -- not by rocks on the ocean floor. About half of all the oxygen we breathe is made near the surface of the ocean by phytoplankton that photosynthesize just like land-dwelling plants. Since the sun is needed to carry out photosynthesis, finding oxygen production at the bottom of the sea, where there is no light, flips conventional wisdom on its head. It was so unexpected that scientists involved in the study first thought it was a mistake.

"This was really weird, because no one had ever seen it before," says Jeffrey Marlow, a BU College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of biology and coauthor on the study, which was published in Nature Geoscience.

As an expert in microbes that live in the most extreme habitats on Earth -- like hardened lava and deep-sea hydrothermal vents -- Marlow initially suspected that microbial activity could be responsible for making oxygen. The research team used deep-sea chambers that land on the seafloor and enclose the seawater, sediment, polymetallic nodules, and living organisms. They then measured how oxygen levels changed in the chambers over 48 hours. If there are plentiful organisms breathing oxygen, then the levels would normally decline, depending on how much animal activity is present in the chamber. But in this case, oxygen was increasing.

" 'We did a lot of troubleshooting and found that the oxygen levels increased many more times following that initial measurement,' Marlow says. 'So we're now convinced it's a real signal.'

"He and his colleagues were aboard a research vessel tasked with learning more about the ecology of the CCZ, which spans 1.7 million square miles between #Hawaii and #Mexico, for an environmental survey sponsored by The Metals Company, a deep-sea mining firm interested in extracting the rocks en masse for metals. After running experiments on board the vessel, Marlow and the team, led by Andrew Sweetman at the Scottish Association for Marine Science, concluded the phenomenon isn't primarily caused by microbial activity, despite the abundance of many different types of microbes both on and inside the rocks.

"#PolymetallicNodules are made of rare metals, including #copper, nickel, cobalt, iron, and manganese, which is why companies are interested in mining them. It turns out, according to the study, that those densely packed metals are likely triggering "seawater electrolysis." This means that metal ions in the rock layers are distributed unevenly, creating a separation of electrical charges -- just like what happens inside of a battery. This phenomenon creates enough energy to split water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen. They named this "dark oxygen," since it's oxygen made with no sunlight. What remains unclear is the exact mechanism of how this happens, if oxygen levels vary across the CCZ, and if the oxygen plays a significant role in sustaining the local ecosystem."

sciencedaily.com/releases/2024

ScienceDailyOxygen produced in the deep sea raises questions about extraterrestrial lifeRocks are generating 'dark oxygen' in an area being explored for deep-sea mining.

So, the discovery of #DarkOxygen deep under the ocean reminds me of how #NativeAmericans and other #IndigenousPeoples have warned us that messing with certain places could affect life on #MotherEarth -- that some of them keep harmful forces (radiation) in check, or are essential in the creation of oxygen. Life on Earth exists only because certain elements have come together in a certain way. Why mess with what works?!!!
#Extinction #DefendTheSacred #DefendMotherEarth #NoDeepSeaMining #LeaveItInTheGround #LeaveItInTheOcean #WaterIsLife #NoUraniumMining #NoLithiumMining #Recycle #ElectronicsRecycling