A few days ago I pondered oxygen being formed from irradiation. In an ocean, oxygen can also be formed by metal balls, little nodules on the seafloor.
Anyway once those nodules are on the floor, they electrolyze the water so that animal and fungal life can breathe. Even without chloroplasts.
I have to ask what happens to the hydrogen gassed out from an oxygenated ocean. Hydrogen doesn't dissolve well. Would it create peroxides? Once loosed into an atmosphere it'll probably react with some other gas. Cyanides, hydrazine, ammonia, organic compounds... the surface probably wouldn't be a nice place to live.
How those nodules form, in the presence of oxygen which they create, is another question. What "reduces" metals? Methane and carbon monoxide, from methanogenic bacteria, would do it. But for how long before the oxygen poisons the bacteria?
BACKDATE 7/24
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