Marine Methane Heats Things Up

Thanks! On the one hand, abiogenic petroleum looks like another bit of Stalinist wishful thinking (like his early endorsement of Lysenko; also, this has been picked up on by Jeff Rense, a notorious hater of Jews), but it has the virtue of having paid off. The deepest gas wells at least used to be in the USSR / Russia, and they were drilled with the abiogenic model as a guide.

Life, but not as we know it
April 4, 2002
other stuff
Recent studies suggest that the mass of bacteria existing below ground may be larger than the mass of all living things at the Earth’s surface, according to sources cited by the paper's lead author, Friedemann Freund (NASA Ames Research Center)... "The hydrogen that could feed bacteria…comes from a subtle chemical reaction that occurs within rocks that were once hot or even molten. In the top 20 kilometres of Earth's crust the conditions are right to produce a nearly inexhaustible supply of hydrogen." ...Microorganisms in the deep biosphere do not live off the sunlight-derived energy that green plants trap during photosynthesis, but use chemical energy sources such as hydrogen... The paper by Freund and his coworkers also may help answer non-biological questions related to the commercial viability of tapping hydrogen reserves deep in the rocks and to questions of mine safety. Sometimes, during mining and drilling, enough hydrogen seeps out of wall rocks to form explosive gas mixtures.

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