Month: May 2005

Clark Ashton Smith was a friend of H. P. Lovecraft, though the two never met–they only corresponded by mail. Like Lovecraft, Klarkash-Ton (as Lovecraft called him) was a writer of weird fiction. He was also a painter and a sculptor.

In one of his stories–The Seven Geases–Smith tells the tale of a prehistoric and supremely overconfident hunter named Ralibar Vooz, who messes with a wizard and, for his trouble, gets himself put under a "geas" (a kind of magical bond or imperative; the term is taken from Irish folklore). The geas is to go to present himself to the furry toad god Tsathoggua and allow himself to be eaten as a sacrifice.

Fortunately for Ralibar Vooz, the furry toad god isn’t hungry at the moment and so puts a new geas on Vooz, sending him to another magical being. He is in turn sent to several more magical beings until he finally has a seventh geas put on him (hence the title of the story).

It’s a very creative tale!

I was particularly struck by the magical being Vooz encounters that puts the seventh geas on him. It’s a creature named Abhoth, which is a kind of squirming pool-like mass that fissions off from itself countless misshapen creatures that scamper about in the darkness of its cave, deep in the Earth. Here’s what Ralibar Vooz sees when he encounters it:

Here, it seemed, was the ultimate source of all miscreation and abomination.
For the gray mass quobbed and quivered, and swelled perpetually; and from it, in
manifold fission, were spawned the anatomies that crept away on every side
through the grotto. There were things like bodiless legs or arms that flailed in
the slime, or heads that rolled, or floundering bellies with fishes’ fins; and
all manner of things malformed and monstrous, that grew in size as they departed
from the neigbborhood of Abhoth. And those that swam not swiftly ashore when
they fell into the pool from Abhoth, were devoured by mouths that gaped in the
parent bulk.

Abhoth is thus a kind of primordial biosphere deep in the bowels of the Earth.

Fortunately, nothing like that exists in real life.

FREAKY IDEA #2

Maybe something does.

One of the concommitant theories associated with Thomas Gold’s abiogenic theory of the origin of oil is the idea that there is a "deep hot biosphere" down in the bowels of the Earth.

More from his interview (link forthcoming) with WIRED:

In his nineties, Gold is championing the idea that the creatures living on or near the surface of the Earth – plants, people, possums, porpoises, pneumonia bacilli – are just part of the biological story. In the depths of the Earth’s crust, he believes, is a second realm, a bacterial "deep hot biosphere" that is greater in mass than all the creatures living on land and swimming in the seas. Most biologists will tell you that life is something that happens on the Earth’s surface, powered by sunlight. Gold counters that most living beings reside deep in the Earth’s crust at temperatures well above 100 degrees Celsius, living off methane and other hydrocarbons.

Wired: You published your ideas about the deep hot biosphere in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 1992. What evidence since then has confirmed your beliefs?

Gold: A large number of people have found more microbial life in deep boreholes.

And in deep caves?

Yes, that’s important.

So the buildup of evidence and interest must be gratifying.

Oh yes, it’s certainly nice. But what I find a little distressing is that even though I published that article in ’92 – I’d already submitted it to Nature in ’88, but they wouldn’t publish it – a lot of people describe their work as if they had made the discovery of a deep hot biosphere and it had never been thought of before.

You saw what you thought was evidence when you drilled in Sweden and found signs of life 6 kilometers down in the form of sludge and tiny grains of the mineral magnetite. What was the significance of that finding?

Magnetite is a chemically reduced form of iron oxide, which means it has less oxygen bound to the iron than more common iron oxides. The whole story of the deep hot biosphere is that oil coming up from below, without biology, will be food material for microbiology when it gets to a relatively shallow level where the temperature is not too high. For the microbes to use that oil as food when there’s no atmospheric oxygen, they have to find oxygen in the rocks. There is plenty there, but there is not all that much in an easily removable form.

But what is easily usable is in common iron oxides – and when that’s used, magnetite gets left behind.

Yes.

What first made you think that there might be life at such depths?

It was in response to the long debate over how helium, which is concentrated in oil, could be associated with petroleum and biological debris. Helium has no affinity chemically with biological stuff. My argument was that the helium must have been swept up from below by petroleum from deep down, and that led me to the whole notion of the deep biosphere.

Pretty freaky, eh kids? We may have a layer of life down there that’s more massive than all the life we see up here–if Gold is right about things, though as usual, his ideas are sharply criticized by mainstream folks.

MORE ON THE DEEP HOT BIOSPHERE IDEA.

Now wait until the other shoe to drops.

Let this post serve to introduce Freaky Friday here on the blog.

FREAKY IDEA #1

Y’know how oil is made from decaying plant and/or animal matter rotting deep within the Earth, where it’s subjected to heat and pressure?

Maybe it’s not.

The theory that this is where oil comes from is known as the biogenic ("created from life") theory of the origin of petroleum.

But there’s this other theory, too: The abiogenic ("not created from life") theory.

BASIC INFO HERE.

This theory has been around for a while, but it seems to be attracting more attention of late, even though most western petroleum geologists totally diss it. (This is not the case in Russia, where the theory gets a lot more respect.)

Astronomy has found lots of hydrocarbons in space–on other planets in the solar system–and so it seems that there was a lot of hydrocarbon floating around the area where the solar system coalesced. It’s part of the planets. That would suggest that there’s a lot of hydrocarbons down in the Earth, too. Maybe some of those hydrocarbons take the form of . . . oil.

If so, what are the implications? According to one of the leading western exponents of the abiogenic origin of petroleum theory–the noted physicist Thomas Gold–it would mean that we’ve got a lot more oil on our hands than we thought. In other words, we ain’t nowhere close to running out. Here’s what he told WIRED magazine (link to come in a post later today):

WIRED: Perhaps there was little interest in your idea in the 1980s and ’90s because oil prices stayed low.

GOLD: But that made it clear that the geologists’ [biogenic] theory [which predicted a rapidly diminishing supply] and its predictions were wrong.

Maybe they were off by only a little – after all, the price is now rising steeply.

But that’s only because of the OPEC cartel, which is held together still by the information that the oil is going to run out.

If it’s clear that the fields are refilling, then of course the cartel greatly weakens, and the individual nations will try to outsell the others. So it’s very important economically who is in the right.

How much more oil is there in your view of the world than in the view of traditional petroleum geology?

Oh, a few hundred times more.

A few hundred times more! Only he goes on to point out that it ain’t all accessible right now. The reason has to do with the refilling oil fields he mentioned.

On Gold’s theory, the near-surface reservoirs of oil–which we’re tapping into–are sitting on top of lower reserves, which are under pressure. By sucking the oil out of the top reservoirs, we’re creating a low-pressure area, and the oil down in the high-pressure reserves is siphoned up into the reservoirs we’ve been emptying, thus refilling the oil fields.

And there’s evidence that that’s happening, as even folks who disagree with Gold admit.

Gold cites other evidence for his theory, such as the fact that he was able to drill down through six kilometers of granite in Sweden and find oil. Granite is an igneous rock, so it shouldn’t have oil under it, especially at those depths, if the biogenic theory is correct. You’d expect to find oil on that model in sedimentary rock since sedimentary rock is made from compressed dirt (etc.) just as the biogenic theory of oil holds it to be made from compressed biomatter.

He also points to where in the world we find a lot of oil as evidence for his theory:

What led you to think the liquids holding open these pores [in rock way deep in the Earth] might be hydrocarbons left over from the Earth’s creation?

Probably reading Arthur Holmes, who had written so many things that were egocentric expressions of opinion. He was the great father of geology – and still is – but I found his work quite shocking.

Shocking in what way?

Whenever he discussed some facts that were inconvenient, he would say that they should not be taken seriously, that it was purely due to chance. He far exceeded his information with the opinions that were mixed in – statements like, "Oil is not found in association with coal except accidentally, and not found in volcanic areas except accidentally." Look at the arc of Indonesia, from Burma to New Guinea: It’s far more earthquakey than any other place we know. It makes lots of small, deep earthquakes, it’s along exactly that belt that you have volcanoes – and you have petroleum along the whole of the line. "Never found in association with volcanoes except accidentally" – that’s a hell of an accident.

So I spent years having these problems with geological texts. And then in the 1970s I had some discussions with King Hubbert, the leading American petroleum geologist, whose word counted as God’s. I remember having lunch with him in Washington and saying, "Well, how can you account for the fact that we have oil-producing regions that are so large, that can go from Turkey to Iran to the Persian Gulf and under the plains of Saudi Arabia and on into the mountains of Oman, and the whole of that stretch is oil?"

Why would that be unlikely, given the traditional view of oil forming from organic matter in buried sediments?

Because the oil is all the same, while the sediments in that region are completely different: different ages, different materials. There’s no sedimentary material that is uniform throughout the region, that has any coherence. And this just never struck him. His response was, "In geology we don’t try and explain things – we just report what we see."

Hubbert’s views changed the wealth of nations. The belief that oil would run out, and that those with a source could always increase the price, caused the early-’70s oil crisis. That, to my mind, is a completely stupid attitude that shifted many billions of dollars away from some countries and toward others.

If Hubbert’s view is wrong, it may have bequeathed to us a significant chunk of the Middle East problem, which created super-wealthy corrupt Middle-Eastern states, which may not have ended up super-rich otherwise.

On the other hand, if Gold is correct then the influence of the Middle East may diminish–not because they run out of oil but because we’ve got a lot more oil available around the globe than we thought.

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Now, one operations note: I’ve gotten a bit tired of late putting disclaimers into posts only to have folks not register them and fire off criticisms based on their assumption that I was advocating something I wasn’t. For example, I didn’t claim that Newsweek literally lied, I didn’t say RealID was a good idea, and I most certainly didn’t say that the needs of an employee should be ignored in determining his wages. In fact, I had disclaimers of varying sorts in each of the posts to indicate that I wasn’t saying these things. But some folks apparently didn’t attend to the disclaimers and got bent out of shape, so allow me to add a big red disclaimer to this post. It also applies to the other Freaky Friday posts I’m about to make.

THE BIG RED DISCLAIMER: I have no idea if the abiogenic theory of the origin of petroleum is correct. I’m not advocating this theory or any of Gold’s theories. I’m presenting interesting ideas for consideration. Nothing more.

Time will tell whether or not it is correct.

More to follow.