From the BBC website:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c728ven2v9eo 

I found this fascinating.  Note the twist: plans to mine these nodules on the sea floor for their rare metals.  Maybe this new discovery will add pressure for a rethink.

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Mind boggling - but it make sense. We have a lot of knowledge about metal-water hydrolytic reactions - but these "self-starting systems" are intriguing. I expect the usual rapist mentality will prevail and we will ransack and squander another natural resource we do not fully understand. "Nature's Bounty"

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Yes this was a fascinating observation. They were trying to measure an oxygen decrease in a sea floor chamber due to O2 uptake by seafloor lifeforms but ended up measuring an increase instead. 

This reminded me a lot of the "Dark Matter" and "Dark Energy" debates in cosmology where there is an inconvenient observation and the search starts for a theory to try and fit the new facts

In this case they are looking at the presence of metallic globules being deposited on seafloor objects where there is a junction of different metals allowing electron flow (current) which ionises the water around it. One obvious measurement which I didn't see anywhere in the report would be to see if there was also a H2 increase in the same chambers to add weight to the water splitting theory

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