Crustal faulting drives biological redox cycling in the deep subsurface
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the deep biosphere, where surface-derived substrates are depleted, microbial communities rely on redox pairs generated through water-rock reactions to sustain metabolism. A notable example of this is the production of hydrogen gas (H 2 ) and oxidants from rock fracturing. However, the potential interactions between these initial redox pairs and a key subsurface element—iron (Fe)—remain underexplored. Here, we simulated radical-induced water splitting to investigate the formation and evolution of redox gradients. Our results show that in the presence of Fe, ferrous iron (Fe 2+ ) was marginally oxidized to ferric iron (Fe 3+ ) by low concentrations of oxidants, whereas Fe 3+ was efficiently reduced back to Fe 2+ by reactive hydrogen atoms (•H). We propose that crustal faulting can generate various redox pairs and drive Fe redox cycling, thereby providing a sustained energy source for subsurface life on Earth and potentially on other planetary bodies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".