595: Dark Oxygen | CIA Deep Sea Secret Could Trigger the Next Extinction Event (STRIPPED)

The Why Files: Operation Podcast

Science, Life Sciences, Fiction, Society & Culture, Documentary, Science Fiction

4.8 • 5.9K Ratings

🗓️ 23 May 2025

⏱️ 22 minutes

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Summary

Two miles below the Pacific Ocean, scientists have discovered something impossible: rocks that generate electricity and produce oxygen without sunlight. These ancient metallic "batteries" could be the original source of Earth's oxygen - before plants or algae existed.

The CIA has known about these rocks since the 1960s, keeping their true potential classified for decades. The discovery dramatically expands where alien life might exist, from billions of possibilities to trillions.

These seafloor nodules host thousands of newly discovered species that evolved to harness electricity directly. But now, deep-sea mining threatens to destroy in days what took millions of years to form.

Dark Oxygen forces us to reconsider our understanding of life on Earth and beyond. Could disrupting this hidden electrical network trigger the next mass extinction?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Two and a half miles beneath the Pacific Ocean is total darkness.
0:08.0	No sunlight reaches there. No plants grow there.
0:11.0	So when oxygen sensors on the ocean floor came back positive,
0:16.0	the scientists thought it was an equipment failure.
0:19.0	They tried again. Same result.
0:21.6	Oxygen was being created not by plants or sea life.
0:25.6	It was coming from rocks.
0:27.6	Ancient metallic rocks that generate electricity.
0:30.6	They produce enough current to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen.
0:36.6	They called it dark oxygen.
0:38.3	This changes everything we know about the Earth's early atmosphere,
0:42.3	and about the evolution of life, and about where we might find alien life.
0:47.3	In 2024, the dark oxygen study stunned the scientific community.
0:53.3	Researchers from dozens of fields and hundreds of organizations scrambled to understand the implications.
1:00.0	But one organization wasn't surprised. They've known about these electric rocks since the 1960s.
1:05.7	They even mined them in the 1970s. that organization is the CIA.
1:27.4	The Clarion Clipperton Zone, or CCZ, looks like an underwater desert. It stretches across 1.7 million square miles of the Pacific.
1:33.3	It's bigger than India, almost two miles down.
1:36.3	Cold, dark, pressure that would crush any living organism.
1:41.3	Or so we thought.
1:43.3	In 1968, a Soviet submarine carrying nuclear missiles sank in the
1:47.6	Pacific. The Soviets couldn't find it. The U.S. government wanted that sub. The CIA launched
	...

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