Oil is from Asteroids, not Organics!, page 1

Millions of Americans learned in grade school that oil deposits originated in the age of dinosaurs, when vegetation in lush forests was buried and subjected to high heat and pressure. Those extreme conditions supposedly transformed the hydrocarbons in vegetation into the hydrocarbons of petroleum.

"That's nonsense," snapped Thomas Gold, a scientist at Cornell University. "There's not a shred of evidence from chemistry, geology, or any other science to support it. It has no place in textbooks and school classrooms."



Oil is often called a 'fossil' fuel; the idea being that it comes from formerly living organisms. This may have been plausible back when oil wells were drilled into the fossil layers of the earth's crust; but today, great quantities of oil are found in deeper wells that are found below the level of any fossils. How could then oil have come from fossils, or decomposed former living matter, if it exists in rock formations far below layers of fossils the evidence of formerly living organisms? It must not come from living matter at all!

Tar-coated comets and oily asteroids

The idea that complex hydrocarbons (the main components of petroleum oil) are a natural part of the Earth's crust should come as no surprise to scientists who study comets and asteroids. Some of the meteorites that fall to Earth are rich in tar-like hydrocarbons. Comets such as Halley and Hale-Bopp are thought to have a skin of tar-like material covering a "dirty snowball" -- like an ice cream dipped in chocolate.



The early Earth was made of the same stuff as comets and asteroids, so the presence of hydrocarbons deep within the Earth is to be expected. It used to be thought that the fierce heat deep underground was sufficient to break up any hydrocarbon molecules. However, Russian scientists have demonstrated that the enormous pressures prevent this.

Even if the Earth did not manage to retain its original supply of hydrocarbons it is likely that the rain of comets, space dust and asteroids over billions of years would have kept the crust of the Earth topped off with the raw ingredients for oil.



Hydrocarbon sources can be found at great depths below the surface, not a few miles, but a few hundred miles. The deep-Earth sources of hydrocarbons are still wor-king to this day, pumping tons of petroleum and methane gas up through the deep Earth's cracks and pores to the shallow sedimentary levels. It is here that drilling rigs access the upwelling that has been vertically dammed into reservoirs. Hydrocarbons did not come from rotting prehistoric plants; they were here a few billion years before life occurred.

Professor Gold discusses the latest space research in-formation, much of which he discovered or pro-posed, which confirms that hydrocarbons are present on lifeless heavenly bodies such as moons, asteroids, comets, and, of course, the gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptu-ne. In fact, the blue coloration of planet Uranus is the result of methane, a so-called fossil fuel. As Gold comments,"I am sure there are no big stagnant swamps on Titan or Pluto."

To support the abiogenic theory, Gold notes several points:

1) The geographical patterns that emerge from the oil fields, whether in the Middle East or Indonesia, all exhibit a correspondence to deep-Earth geological structure. This is in stark contrast to the haphazard deposition we find with surface life, and its subsequent fossils, which have never exhibited such patterns.

2) Hydrocarbons from a particular oil field do not exhibit chemical changes as the depth of their extraction increases. But the fossils above them have constantly changing biologi-cal "signatures," which relate to their particular paleontological periods.

3) Hydrocarbons are found in geographic areas where the amount of prehistoric life known to be at that location could never have provided the quantities of hydrocarbons involved. Most surface life is comprised of 90 percent water and 10 percent organic compounds. So, even if that 10 percent that is organic compounds had been entirely converted to "fossil fuels," it would not come close to the mass of hydrocarbons already extracted during the last 130 years.

4) Because hydrocarbons are so consistent, the use of distinct trace metals can be used to identify their geographic: origin.

5) The existing petroleum reservoirs are refilling themselves - from the bottom! Gold ex-plains: "The phenomenon of petroleum reservoirs that seem to refill themselves is widely reported, notably in the Middle East and along the U.S. Gulf Coast. I regard these occurrences as strong evidence for the deep-Earth gas theory."

Resources:

www.aapg.org...
www.davidicke.net...
mitosyfraudes.8k.com...


[Edited on 16-3-2004 by kinglizard]

If it were true:

Well, I thought it was Extremely Bad Science until I looked up Gold's website... and yes, he's a prof emeritus of astrophysics at Cornell and yes he's got books and research papers out and yes, that IS what he was saying in 1993.
people.cornell.edu...

Lots of people (including geologists) have problems with his interpretation:
www.news.cornell.edu...

However, even his students have found weaknesses in this and other theories of his (in this one, he says that solar sails aren't possible... and we know this to be wrong):
www.planetary.org...

He's very vocal about scientists who tend to avoid controversial or unusual ideas:
www.amasci.com...

I suspect that this is because people criticize him so heavily. I personally think it's too farfetched; that I haven't seen any evidence that comets are tarballs or that there was enough of that stuff floating around that hit the earth. But I could be open to other interpretations if better evidence came up.

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