Calculations favor reducing atmosphere for early earth: Was Miller-Urey experiment correct?

Washington University in St. Louis ^ | 07 September 2005 | Tony Fitzpatrick

[PatrickHenry]

Here's a link to the last thread we had on the Miller experiment, back in April of this year:
Organic-Rich Soup-in-the-Ocean of Early Earth [Miller experiment revisited].

[PatrickHenry]

EvolutionPing

A pro-evolution science list with over 300 names. See the list's explanation at my freeper homepage. Then FReepmail to be added or dropped.

[Robert A Cook PE]

Bookmarked.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[SteveMcKing]

Venus... a great "fixer-upper".

[VadeRetro]

There goes a lot of creationist lawyering out the window.

[carumba]

Abiogenesis myth rides again.

[Citizen Tom Paine]

A couple of things are forgotten about the Urey-Miller experiment.

1. It also produced a lot of tar. This tar is not seen in the geologic column anywhere on the Earth.

2. For their experiment to work, other byproducts of the experiment had to be removed at frequent intervals.

The meteorite experiment is interesting in and of itself because it shows that ammonia was present in the universe before or during the Earth's formation.

[narby]

Abiogenesis myth rides again.

Yeah. I prefer Coyotemans myths better.

[js1138]

1. It also produced a lot of tar. This tar is not seen in the geologic column anywhere on the Earth.

Unless you count petroleum.

[VadeRetro]

Tom has never been to the LaBrea Bubble Gum Pits.

[js1138]

Seriously, I slept through most of my geology classes. (Remember Ben Stein as a science teacher? I had him for geology.)

Is it possible or reasonable that some or most petroleum is left over from early, prebiotic tar formation? Or is petroleum associated with later strata? Isn't there a guy named Gold who believes petroleum is abiotic?

It's times like this I wish I'd payed attention to what my teacher tried to tell me.

[Right Wing Professor]

Tom has never been to the LaBrea Bubble Gum Pits.

LOL! We have an early leader for 'funniest one-liner of the week'.

[PatrickHenry]

Here's a repeat post from an earlier thread on the Miller experiment, which is just as appropriate now as then:

Someone is almost sure to drop in and claim that Louis Pasteur "proved" that life can't be created from non-living material. This is a mis-understanding of the ancient term spontaneous generation. This website: The Slow Death of Spontaneous Generation, explains what Pasteur actually did: he demonstrated that meat spoiled because of airborne microbes, not "spontaneously" by itself.

[VadeRetro]

Wikipedia describes both ideas, but the "biogenic" theory is "mainstream."

When it was later discovered that all fossil fuels contain traces of biological debris, the biogenic theory gained further support because the idea that life (even microbial life) could exist at the depths at which petroleum had been found seemed even less plausible.

Still, the idea that tar is not found at all anywhere strikes me as funny.

[js1138]

...because the idea that life (even microbial life) could exist at the depths at which petroleum had been found seemed even less plausible.

Well, excuse my admitted ignorance, but the discovery of thermophyles seems to blow this assumption away. Secondly, the theories don't have to be mutually exclusive. If a Miller process formed petroleum, there is no reason to believe that early life shouldn't be found in the same strata.

So what kind of biological debris is found in petroleum? Anything that would date it by morphology, or is it just generic organic molecules?

[VadeRetro]

I agree, really. We didn't know much about extremophiles in the 19th century.

Futhermore, oil often ends up blocked by some impermeable capping layer, having migrated under pressure from somewhere below. Thus, I'm not sure how you know when it was formed unless it's some kind of isotope dating.

[js1138]

Kind of quiet on the creationist front.

I have a book, Seven Clues to the Origin of Life that talks about the tar problem in abiogenesis. This is not a done deal, but it would be interesting to find that petroleum can form without life.

[MeanWestTexan]

Wow something I actually can be an expert on (petroleum geologist).

The "tar/hydrocarbons" he hypothosizes about is something like 26 miles down.

To give perspective, the deepest wells are in the 5 mile range, with a few in the 7ish mile range --- and there have been probably 300-400 of these ultra-deep wells ever drilled.

They actually hunted for this abiotic oil, drilling in some sea-floor areas where the Earth's crust was thinish -- the amazing machanical problems got in the way.

The oil/gas we use is almost certainly biotic --- the consistent corrolation with reefs and other structures of something that used to be alive (while they may merely be a "trapping" structure) is far too coincidental.

Personally, I opine that there might very well be abioltic tar somewher down there, but: (1) good luck getting there and (2) ever more good luck getting it to flow ("communicate" to your wellbore.

You need porosity of some kind -- cracks, holes, sand, whatever --- and that depth almost certainly smushed the heck out of any "empty" space where hydrocarbons might reside.

[js1138]

You've just made me more curious. I suppose if someone has invested millions of dollars drilling, It must have some plausibility.