Scientists plan deep-sea expedition to probe ‘dark oxygen’

A team of scientists announced on Tuesday that they had developed new deep-sea landers specifically to test their contentious discovery that metallic rocks at the bottom of the ocean are producing “dark oxygen”. If a previously unknown source of oxygen has always been lurking in Earth’s depths, it would represent a remarkable revelation that would call into question long-held assumptions about the origins of life on our planet. But the deep-sea mining industry – which is keen to extract precious...