Posted on 11/19/2010 1:25:40 PM PST by Fractal Trader
IT'S crawling with life down there. A remote expedition to the deepest layer of the Earth's oceanic crust has revealed a new ecosystem living over a kilometre beneath our feet. It is the first time that life has been found in the crust's deepest layer, and an analysis of the new biosphere suggests life could exist lower still.
On a hypothetical journey to the centre of the Earth starting at the sea floor, you would travel through sediment, a layer of basalt, and then hit the gabbroic layer, which lies directly above the mantle. Drilling expeditions have reached this layer before, but as the basalt is difficult to pierce it happens rarely.
To facilitate the task, the Integrated Ocean Drilling Programme set its sights on the Atlantis Massif. [SNIP] A team led by Stephen Giovannoni of Oregon State University in Corvallis drilled down to 1391 metres, where temperatures reach 102 °C.
There, they found communities of bacteria that were sparse but widespread. The type of bacteria they found came as a surprise to Giovannoni, who has previously found micro-organisms living in the basalt layer. "We expected to find similar organisms in the deeper layer," he says. "But actually it was very different."
One key difference was that archaea were absent in the gabbroic layer. Also, genetic analysis revealed that unlike their upstairs neighbours, many of the gabbroic bugs had evolved to feed off hydrocarbons like methane and benzene. [SNIP]
"This deep biosphere is a very important discovery," says Rolf Pedersen of the University of Bergen, Norway. He points out that the reactions that produce oil and gas abiotically inside the crust could happen in the mantle, meaning life may be thriving deeper yet.
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
This only works in foreign countries. In the US -- uniquely in the world -- drilling for oil results in the mass extinction of all species and earthquakes. ;') Though his papers remained online (along with his other faculty webpages) for some time after his death, the URLs I've stored no longer work.Recharging of oil and gas fieldsVertically stacked domains of hydrocarbons have been found in all cases where drilling was sufficient to display them. The consistent tendency to find hydrocarbons below any producing region has been given the name of "Koudyavtsev's Rule", after the important Russian petroleum investigator who discovered this effect and collected a very large number of examples of it from all parts of the world. This rule would be the consequence of a deep origin of hydrocarbons and a steady process of outgassing... [In Kuwait] [t]he extraction of g[r]oundwater at the shallow levels results in the disintegration of the barrier to the oil levels just below, and the water in the wells is suddenly replaced by oil. The delicate pressure balance that had established itself, just up to the level that the strength of the rock could bear, had been upset. Similarly in stacked domains of hydrocarbons, the lower domains will be opened quickly, once the upper ones had been depleted and the fluid pressure thereby reduced sufficiently. This process can be fast, just as it is in Kuwait, where we had the advantage that a different liquid (water) filled the upper domain, so that one could identify the rupture to the oil filled domain below.
by Thomas Gold
September 1999
As I stated previously, the other conclusion one can draw from this evidence is that life started in the mantle and slowly moved outwards into the crust, then the oceans and ultimately onto land. If this is what happened, then there may be life inside all of the rocky planets plus a number of the moons.
The Siljan Ring drill project was in Sweden, and that was one of Thomas Gold’s experiments in this field. Here are the URLs I have of his formerly online papers, those interested can probably find them via the Webarchive.
http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/assoc.html
http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/DHB.html
http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/depth.html
http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/Earthq.html
http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/eyewit.html
http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/hazard.html
http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/index.html
http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/Krop.html
http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/metal.html
http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/Natgas.html
http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/origins.html
http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/recharging/
http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/usgs.html
Life on other PlanetsHighly oxidized iron is abundant on Mars, and very small-grained magnetite can then be expected to be one of the accumulated residues of microbial processes; so can iron sulfide and methane-derived carbonates. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are the large molecules that might remain in a rock that originally contained crude oil but then was exposed for millions of years to the high vacuum of space. All these substances have been found in the discovery meteorite, closely packaged to each other, and this by itself would make a strong case for the microbial interpretation. In addition, there are small objects seen under scanning electron microscopy that may well be fossils of microbes. While the last item by itself would not be conclusive evidence, the combination of this together with oil and the three residue products make a strong case for the microbial explanation. It is true that each step can occur without biological intervention, but the chance of finding by chance the evidence for all three solids in a small volume, together with hydrocarbons, seems to be very low. Many terrestrial oil and gas wells show just such an association (but an association with helium also, which the meteorite could not have transported through space).
by Thomas Gold
May 1997
http://www.science-frontiers.com/sf090/sf090g08.htm
THE KTB HOLE
KTB = Kontinentales Tiefbohrprogramm der Bundesrepublik Deutschland
If you could drop a pfennig down the KTB hole, it would take several minutes to hit bottom, for this research drill hole has now penetrated to 7.5 kilometers. It is the second deepest man-made hole, after the Soviet 12-km hole in the Kola Peninsula. Drilled solely for scientific purposes, the rocks and strata encountered by the KTB drill bits have forced the redrawing of German geological maps. The “real” subterranean world turned out to be quite different from that inferred from both surface indications and the seismic and electrical probing of the depths. Three specific surprises are worth mentioning:
Temperatures in the drill hole rose far faster than predicted. The expected boundary (”suture”) between two old tectonic plates thought to exist at 3 km according to surface geology had not yet appeared at 7.5 km. Most interestingly, crevicular structure (crevices and pores) existed at almost all depths, even though theory said they could not because of intense pressures. And these voids were filled with fluids. P. Keher, a KTB scientist, was amazed at what the drill found:
“When I started 25 years ago, the idea was that the deeper you go into the crust, the drier it gets.”
(Kerr, Richard A.; “Looking — Deeply — into the Earth’s Crust in Europe,” Science, 261:295, 1993.)
Comment. Deep-living bacteria were not mentioned in the above article, but Soviet scientists claim to have pumped them up from 12 km down! Outer space may not be our final frontier despite the introductory blurb to Star Trek!
From Science Frontiers #90, NOV-DEC 1993. (C) 1993-2000 William R. Corliss
See? I knew there were Mud Men...
Oh, sorry, archiving on the wayback machine of the Thomas Gold papers was blocked by Robots.txt — damn, I hate those stupid robots.
http://www.google.com/search?q=thomas+gold+site:cornell.edu
There’ll be a test Monday. ;’)
On Saturn's moon Titan they discovered something is reducing Acetylene on the surface. It could be life.
Here it is again, anyway:
He points out that the reactions that produce oil and gas abiotically inside the crust could happen in the mantle,
I thought this concept was a major poo-pooing trigger from both mainstream scientists as well as environuts.
Sounds like Gold and the Russkies may be vindicated in the not so distant future.
It’s okay, I’m beginning to think I can cure a rainy day.
Interesting.
ROKY CRIKENSON: And so, at each death, the soul descends further into the inner earth, attaining ever greater levels of purification, reaching... enlightenment at the core. Assuming, of course, that your soul is able to avoid... the lava men.
Thomas J Gold: "But I am not really willing to accept your premise, because it may well be that the means of communications they have are of a kind that we do not know how to receive, and that they would not have the means of communicating with sufficiently powerful radio or optical signals. That is something which, technologically, is too difficult for them but they would have some other means we would not recognize." and "What we can conclude from this is that we must think very widely as to what it takes to develop intelligence and not take us so much as a model of what is necessary." [Communication with Extraterrestial Intelligence, p 123; Sagan editor -- CETI was the old acronym]
My pleasure!
Hydrocarbons, yes. Not crude oil however.
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