This cast doubt on the long-established view that life was made possible when organisms started producing oxygen via photosynthesis, which requires sunlight, about 2.7 billion years ago.
"Deep-sea discovery calls into question the origins of life," the Scottish Association for Marine Science said in a press release to accompany the publication of the research.
Environmentalists said the presence of dark oxygen showed just how little is known about life at these extreme depths, and supported their case that deep-sea mining posed unacceptable ecological risks.
"This incredible discovery underlines the urgency of that call".
The discovery was made in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a vast underwater region of the Pacific Ocean between Mexico and Hawaii of growing interest to mining companies.
It has sharply criticized the study by marine ecologist Andrew Sweetman and his team as plagued by "methodological flaws".
Michael Clarke, environmental manager at The Metals Company, told AFP that the findings "are more logically attributable to poor scientific technique and shoddy science than a never before observed phenomenon."
Sweetman's findings proved explosive, with many in the scientific community expressing reservations or rejecting the conclusions.
Since July, five academic research papers refuting Sweetman's findings have been submitted for review and publication.
Olivier Rouxel, a geochemistry researcher at Ifremer, the French national institute for ocean science and technology, told AFP there was "absolutely no consensus on these results".
"These types of back and forth are very common with scientific articles and it moves the subject matter forward," he said.
Journal information: Nature Geoscience
Cooperation—defined as the ability of individuals to incur a personal cost for the benefit of a group—is a fundamental aspect of human behavior. Understanding how we can foster cooperation is essential for tackling many global challenges, from climate change to the spread of infectious diseases—and understanding what motivates people to cooperate is key to this process.
"While this was purely a laboratory-based experiment, it gives us some valuable insights into how we can better understand, predict and perhaps manipulate people's behavior to improve cooperation between individuals and groups."
In their experiment, the researchers used a well-established interactive experiment based on game theory, called the Prisoner's Dilemma. They invited 88 participants, a mixture of men and women aged between 18 and 35 years old.
The participants took part in a series of laboratory games in which they were invited to make decisions about cooperating for mutual benefit for them and a partner or acting alone for individual benefit. Different levels of reward were given for different decisions made.
By placing information about the payoffs of other participants in areas of the screen where they were likely to be given most attention, the researchers found they were able to influence cooperation rates among participants.
Surprisingly, although participants followed a natural screen-reading pattern of looking at the top left of the screen first, before reading information lower down, the researchers found that cooperation was higher when the 'cooperation information' was placed at the bottom of the screen.
More information: Manipulating Attention Facilitates Cooperation, Communications Psychology (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s44271-025-00206-9
Journal information: Communications Psycholog
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