Episode 98: Dark oxygen
From Science Fictions by Tom Chivers and Stuart Ritchie
March 17, 2026 · 59 min
About this episode
The episode discusses the discovery of 'dark oxygen' at the ocean floor and its implications for marine science and the origins of aerobic life.
In 2024, researchers claimed to find something mysterious at the bottom of the ocean. It was “dark oxygen”—oxygen produced where there’s no chance of photosynthesis. So what could possibly be producing it? Natural batteries—at least according to the scientists. This bizarre discovery seemed to upend everything we knew about the abyssal floor, had big implications for deep sea mining, and might even have helped explain the origin of aerobic life. But (and look, you know what we’re going to say here) could there have been something a little more mundane explaining the findings? The Science Fictions podcast is brought to you by Works in Progress magazine. On this week’s episode we talked about the new article on the genetics of cabbages , and how the wild cabbage has been selected into so many of the familiar vegetables we know today. Find this and so many more articles, all for free, at worksinprogress.co . Show notes * The 2024 dark oxygen paper in Nature Geosciences * Media coverage: BBC , Guardian , New Scientist * Andrew Sweetman’s piece in The Conversation discussing his research * On the deep seas of Enceladus and Europa * The UN and Greenpeace discussing the implications of…
People in this episode
Hosts: Tom Chivers, Stuart Ritchie
Topics covered
- dark oxygen
- deep sea mining
- aerobic life
- ocean research
- marine science
Keywords
- dark oxygen
- ocean
- marine mining
- aerobic life
- research
- deep sea
Sponsors
Works in Progress
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Nature Geosciences, BBC, Guardian, New Scientist, UN, Greenpeace, Frontiers in Marine Science, EarthArXiv
Places: Enceladus, Europa, Norway
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