As part of apologetic thinking to prove the truth of Joseph Smith's translating Seer Stone, the discovery of deep-sea polymetallic nodules that have geo-battery potential and can produce oxygen out of sea water, has entered the Mormon Zeitgeist as making the concept of Joseph's stone more than just folk magic.
Preliminary speculation imagines that one of these polymetallic nodules was thrust upward during the creation of the Pangaea supercontinent and later came to rest at the bottom of Willard Chase's well, where it was later "borrowed" by future Prophet Joseph Smith. The rest, as they say, is LDS History.
