by Thomas Gold
foreword by Freeman Dyson
Posted on 03/13/2015 12:10:35 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Living deep underground ain't easy. In addition to hellish temperatures and pressures, there's not a lot to eat. Which is why oil reservoirs are the microbes' cornucopia in this hidden realm.
Microbes feast on many oil reservoirs, but it has been unclear how the microorganisms got to those locales. One proposal has been that the microbes colonize a pool of dead algae corpses and then go along for the ride as the pool gets buried deeper and deeper and the algae slowly become oil. That's the so-called "burial and isolation" hypothesis.
But under that set of rules each pool of oil should have its own unique microbes -- and that's not the case, according to a recent study in the Journal of the International Society for Microbial Ecology. [Camilla L. Nesbo et al, Evidence for extensive gene flow and Thermotoga subpopulations in subsurface and marine environments]
Researchers surveyed the genetics of oil-eating microbes from around the world. They found that populations from Nevada to the North Sea matched up almost exactly. They also determined that microbes in the North Sea appear to have swapped genes with Japanese microbes despite the locations being more than 8,000 kilometers apart on the Earth's surface.
These findings suggest that the deep biosphere is actually filled with connections, and that microbes move from one oil reservoir to another, colonizing them almost as soon as they form in some cases. Or it could also be that marine microbes migrate down and then evolutionary selection pressure causes a convergence in the genetics that make it possible to survive under these extreme conditions.
One thing is certain -- humanity is now definitely helping this mixing of subsurface microbes, as our thirst for oil leads us to poke holes all over the planet.
(Excerpt) Read more at scientificamerican.com ...
by Thomas Gold
foreword by Freeman Dyson
Thanks blam!
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This is about microbes that break oil down, not create it.
(probably a dead link, Dr Gold's been dead a while now)The Origin of Methane (and Oil) in the Crust of the EarthHydrocarbons in our planetary system are certainly very abundant, and in all the extraterrestrial examples mentioned almost certainly not related to biology. Also hydrocarbons are prominent among the gases identified in the molecular clouds of the galaxy, and it is from such clouds that the solar system formed initially. The presence and great abundance of hydrocarbons is universal, and no special mechanism for their generation on the Earth needs to be invoked, unless one knew with certainty that they could not have survived the formation process here, although they did so on many of the other planetary bodies. No evidence of hydrocarbons has yet been seen on Mars, Moon, Venus and Mercury... In earlier times there was the belief that the Earth had formed as a hot, molten body. In that case no hydrocarbons or hydrogen would have survived against oxidation, nor would any of these substances have been maintained in the interior after solidification. With that belief, there seemed no other possibility of accounting for the hydrocarbons embedded in the crust than by the outgassing of carbon in the form of CO2, produced by materials that could have survived in a hot Earth, and subsequent photosynthesis by plants that converted this CO2 into unoxidized carbon compounds. This consideration is irrelevant now that we know that a cold formation process assembled the Earth and that hydrocarbons could have been maintained, and could be here for the same reasons as they are on the other planetary bodies.
by Thomas Gold
U.S.G.S. Professional Paper 1570
The Future of Energy Gases
1993
Yes, that’s right in the title.
So why the Thomas Gold nonsense?
Regarding your use of the word “nonsense” in conjunction with Thomas Gold, opinions vary.
Perhaps because these findings confirm some points of Gold’s hypothesis, even if they don’t confirm the entire thing?
A “cold” formation process for the Earth? Never heard of that. Would be cool to see a link on it.
No doubt.
But one thing has been consistent for decades.
Petroleum Geologist and the like following biotic oil produced from sedimentary sources supply the oil the world runs on.
Promoters of of abiotic oil have produced cash from gullible investors and occasional governments, but no commercial oil production.
They are discussing the opposite.
Maybe this would help explain it.
It would be like saying that fire could be used to make gasoline out of water and carbon-dioxide.
If the “opposite” is true (oil-eating bacteria are prevalent in an extensive underground biosphere), then certain points of Gold’s hypothesis are also proven true (that there is an extensive underground biosphere which bacteria can survive in).
No, that comparison makes no sense whatsoever. We are talking about organic chemicals, which we already know can be produced by either biotic or abiotic processes, and which we already know can also be consumed by biological entities. Not comparable at all with the nonsense statement you made.
That is the point of view of the article. Simply because the authors say the microbes in question break down petroleum, are we to blindly accept the premise? Obviously they are not considering the opposite point of view, which is that the microbes are eating methane and crapping out oil, or leaving behind more complex hydrocarbons as a result of their deaths. And besides, if they are eating the petroleum, why is the petroleum still there? They had plenty of time to eat all th petroleum before we started drilling for it.
Certainly a rudimentary understanding of microbiology is in order. I will use two examples from real life.
First, e Coli: It lives in our intestines, and breaks down the remnants of food after it has been acted upon by acids and enzymes in the digestive tract. What you see when you have a BM is fully 50% e Coli bacteria, by weight. Gross, but illustrative. Are the e Coli eating crap, or making it? Second, beer: Beer is made from sugar which is mixed into water and fed to yeasts, which are unicellular organisms somewhat more advanced evolutionarily than e Coli. They eat the sugar and crap out alcohols and carbon dioxide, and also leave behind some other chemical compounds that are responsible for some of the flavors of beer, like the banana taste of Heffeweizen. Are they eating beer, or making it?
At any rate, Thomas Gold postulated a biological process whereby methane, which is one carbon and three hydrogens, is eaten by some unknown microorganism in the crust of the Earth, and a byproduct of their lives is actually a variety of hydrocarbons which we call petroleum.
It isn't outrageous to conceive of such organisms, since there are all sorts of microorganisms that live in very diverse temperature ranges. Some interesting microorganisms live quite happily in the hot pools in Yellowstone which will boil the skin off of a human in seconds flat.
This discovery actually provides evidence in favor of Gold's hypothesis: the microbes that they are talking about here show that microbes exist in petroleum. So they found them, and came up with a theory more in line with the "squashed dinosaurs" theory of petroleum genesis. It doesn't surprise me one bit that they go right along with the consensus theory.
So regardless of what you might think is nonsense, it would be scientifically responsible to consider the possibility that Thomas Gold might have been on to something. I suspect that Gold was a whole lot smarter when he was alive than you will ever be, with all due respect to your particular academic credentials.
Not to nit-pick, but Methane is one carbon and four hydrogen atoms.
God put ‘em there.
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