Some physicists believe it came from space during the methane ammonia phase of the formation of the planet. They've already found more oil than could be explained by organic processes since the formation of the Earth.
Here's another theory:
Fuel's Paradise
World-class contrarian Thomas Gold has a theory about life on the planet:
It's pumping out of the Earth's crust - and it's swimming in oil.
By Oliver Morton
Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA, helping to crack the genetic
code; since then he has worked on biological problems from the nature of
consciousness to the function of dreams to the origin of life. And through
it all Crick, now 84, has been known to friends as a particularly gifted
thrower of parties. Back in 1947, amid the privations of postwar Cambridge,
England, two students walked into one of these parties, held in Crick's
flat on Trumpington Street, and paused to scan the crowd. Crick was holding
court in the middle of the room, surrounded by young women; other
great-minds-in-formation were located around. In the far corner stood a
clear-faced, rather stern-looking man. "That's Gold of Gold and Pumphrey,"
said one of the students, referring to the team then doing groundbreaking
research on the workings of the ear. "No, no," his companion replied,
"that's Gold of Bondi and Gold," the brilliant pair of mathematicians then
rewriting the rules of cosmology. The stern face across the room, picking
up on their confusion through a trick in the apartment's acoustics, broke
into a smile.
The eavesdropper, and the Gold on both scientific teams, was the same man:
Thomas Gold, a physicist who has enjoyed a career broad enough in its
enthusiasms to make even Francis Crick look narrow. Gold has worked in the
highest reaches of Big Science - overseeing the construction and operation
of the world's largest radio telescope, in Arecibo, Puerto Rico - while
also excelling at the sort of research that requires nothing more than a
pencil, paper, and an idea. He has reimagined the whisperings inside the
ear, the universe as a whole, and, most recently, the ground beneath your
feet. And he's done so with a profound indifference to the opinions of
others. Gold is not just wide-ranging: He's a world-class contrarian. Very
few people agree with him on everything, which suggests he's sometimes
wrong. But he's also sometimes right. And he's always either interesting or
infuriating, depending on where you're coming from.
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.
Presented in full in his 1999 book, The Deep Hot Biosphere, Gold's theory
of life below the Earth's surface is an outgrowth of his heretical theories
about the origins of oil, coal, and natural gas. In the traditional view,
of course, these substances are the residues of dead creatures. When
organic matter from swamps and seafloors gets buried deep enough in the
crust, it goes through chemical changes that distill it into hydrocarbons
we can then dig up and burn. Gold believes none of this. He's convinced
that the hydrocarbons we use come from chemical stocks that were
incorporated into the Earth at its creation.
Since the oil crisis of the 1970s, Gold has been saying that the Earth is
hugely well endowed with these hydrocarbons - hundreds of times more so
than most geologists, or oil companies, or OPEC leaders believe. The
general belief in scarcity that drives up gas prices and causes fears of
inflation, Gold argues, is a mirage that has served vested interests among
oil producers for decades.
But this is one Gold theory that very few agree with. Conventional
petroleum geologists hold that hydrocarbons are created by the burial of
organic material to depths where moderate levels of heat and pressure
"cook" it into oil and gas, which then migrate through the crust to the
sorts of sedimentary structures best suited to trap them. Geochemists argue
that the bulk of the world's hydrocarbons couldn't possibly reside in the
Earth's mantle, as Gold posits; at that depth, hydrocarbons would react
with the mantle, oxidizing into carbon dioxide, a process which, Gold's
foes believe, is evident in the belching forth of carbon dioxide from the
Earth's volcanoes. As Steve Drury, who reviewed Gold's book for Geological
Magazine, puts it, "Any Earth scientist will take a perverse delight in
reading the book, because it is entertaining stuff, but even a beginner
will see the gaping holes where Gold has deftly avoided the vast bulk of
mundane evidence regarding our planet's hydrocarbons."
If a maverick theory of oil were all there was to the Tommy Gold story, he
could easily be dismissed as a crank. But he is an enormously respected
physicist. When the first radio astronomers started seeing radio sources in
the sky, they thought they were unusual stars; from the early 1950s onward,
Gold championed the idea that they were actually distant galaxies, and
after a long and acrimonious dispute, he was shown to be right. Later, in
the 1960s, a new sort of radio source was detected in the skies, one that
flashed on and off regularly. Gold rushed into print with the idea that
these pulsars were astrophysical oddities called neutron stars, the
existence of which had been predicted in the 1930s but had never been seen.
Many of his colleagues thought the idea outrageous. It was right on the money.
But he isn't always right. In the 1940s, early in his career, Gold
developed the idea of a "steady-state universe" with Herman Bondi and Fred
Hoyle, when the three of them left their wartime jobs in the British
Admiralty and made their way back to Cambridge. (Bondi and Gold, both
Viennese, had met as refugees, sleeping on the concrete floor of a British
internment camp before their mathematical talents were pressed into service
on naval radar programs.) The hypothesis has now been almost completely
rejected in favor of the big bang theory. But for a while the steady-state
idea, in which expansion was eternal and creation continuous, was the most
satisfying scientific explanation of the universe around. Cosmologists now
think it wrong, though few think it stupid.
Some Gold interventions, however, don't look so impressive in hindsight.
His suggestion that the moon might be deeply covered by very fine dust - an
idea he insists was misrepresented by academic enemies - has been widely
dismissed since the Apollo landings. (Gold now thinks the moon, too, may
well have a deep biosphere - as may many other bodies in the solar system.)
And his ideas about hydrocarbons remain widely disputed.
But Gold still argues passionately for his "abiogenic" (not biological in
origin) theory of oil. In the 1980s he persuaded researchers in Sweden to
drill a hole some 6 kilometers deep into solid granite - a rock that
crystallizes out of molten lava deep within the Earth, and thus should not
contain any organic remains - and succeeded in finding some oil. This
didn't convince the geology community, which felt that the oil must have
gotten into the granite through cracks. But Gold took it as a vindication.
In the Swedish experiment, he also saw vindication of his related - and
possibly more fruitful - theory of the deep hot biosphere. One of the
arguments that geologists use to point to biological sources for oil is
that some oil molecules look very much like molecules found in living
cells. But Gold has turned this argument on its head, interpreting the
telltale molecules as signs that there is life feeding on the hydrocarbons
deep below us, not constituting them. Instead of dead creatures turning
into hydrocarbons when buried (the source of the term fossil fuels), Gold
says the hydrocarbons are fuel on which creatures buried in the Earth's
depths survive.
Buried deep in the Earth, says Gold, lies a second realm, a bacterial
biosphere greater in mass than all the creatures living on the surface.
Today, Gold sees other evidence of the deep hot biosphere. There's life on
the floors of the oceans, making use of the chemicals gushing out of
volcanic vents, and there have been bacteria turning up in deep holes all
around the world - in the Columbia River basalts of Washington, in oil
wells in the North Sea, in South African gold mines, and in the Swedish
drilling program Gold set up. And though most planetary scientists are
unconvinced by the claims made in 1996 that a Martian meteorite had fossils
in it, thinking about the Mars rock focused people's minds on the
possibility that a planet with a lifeless surface need not have a lifeless
interior.
Listening to Gold make his case in his home in Ithaca, New York - where for
20 years he ran the Cornell Center for Radiophysics and Space Research - is
to hear one of the 20th century's true scientific originals. His voice -
still recognizably Viennese - is softer than it once was, but his combative
spirit is undimmed. He still works on ideas ranging from the cosmological
to the geophysical. He still gets a kick out of pointing to other people's
mistakes. And he's still convinced, perhaps now more than ever, that he's
discovered one of the great secrets of life.
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.
In your book you talk about being so excited at finding the sludge that you
tried to analyze it yourself in a friend's kitchen.
That's right. I arrived on a Saturday in Mallorca with the sample and I was
alone in the apartment. So first of all I looked around in the neighborhood
and there was not a single shop open. I knew the sample was oily - I could
feel that - so I thought that maybe there would be some nail polish remover
to use as a solvent. I looked through all the cupboards for nail polish
remover but couldn't find any. Eventually I decided hot water and kitchen
detergent would be my best bet. The sludge was like quite thick putty so I
tried to dissolve it - it took a lot of doing. In the end I had a clear
liquid, light gray, and I thought it was particulate. The grain size was so
small that kitchen paper could serve as a chromatogram - diffusion would
take the black stuff some way out through the paper, while the liquid went
much farther. In such a case you think first of a metal. So I thought,
Well, iron is common - is there a magnet in the house? There were magnetic
door latches on the cabinets, so I unscrewed those and put some of my
liquid on aluminum foil and immediately it made sharp lines between the
poles. So it was most likely magnetite.
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.
And you believe that the oily depths where you found magnetite represent
the environment where life on Earth began?
Yes. You can only suppose the origin of life in circumstances where there
is no direct access to the source of at least one of the components that
you require. If you have the common story of the warm pond on the surface,
then all of the things that are needed will be accessible to whatever
microbes there are. So they will multiply exponentially up to the limit of
the food supply. That means that in a flash the whole thing is done and
they are all dead. There has to be a process of metering out at least one
of the components so it's impossible to eat up everything at once. The
hydrocarbons from the mantle provide that metered supply. If life developed
down below, it could later crawl up to the surface and invent photosynthesis.
As I understand it, you think that any planetary body that's warm enough
for liquid water at some depth, and that has hydrocarbons in it, will have
a deep biosphere. So there could be life inside the moon.
What we know about the moon is quite remarkable. The astronauts of the
Apollo program left behind a gadget that measures molecular weights. There
were a few deep earthquakes measured, and in association with those
earthquakes there was always a molecular mass of 16 recorded by the
instrument. Now the people who don't know any chemistry then responded
saying, Well, that's oxygen. But it's no good telling me it was oxygen
atoms because an oxygen atom could not go a centimeter through cracks in
the rock. What fairly stable molecule have we got that has mass 16? Methane.
So it is warm enough for life in the moon. Mars is undoubtedly a better
candidate because it's larger and has more internal heat. Then there are
the satellites of the major planets, also Triton, Pluto, Charon, and the
larger asteroids that have big black markings on them. Not Venus or Mercury
- there the water would disappear altogether.
In my first paper on the subject I advised that one should go down the deep
valley on Mars and to the landslides that have come off its walls in the
hope of finding solid material residue that we have identified as coming
from microbial action.
The current Mars program is focused on what are taken to be previously wet
environments - lake beds and the like.
That is complete nonsense.
How did you feel when you first heard the claims about ALH 84001, the
meteorite from Mars in which some people saw signs of life?
I think immediately the first information was that there were small grains
of magnetite in there, and sulfides, and there was oil in there.
What they called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons?
That's oil. Sulfides and magnetite were immediately reported, all close
together. And there was a calcite cement. All these things are typical of
what you find down boreholes. To my mind they have a much stronger case
than the one they made for saying this is biological.
If meteorites can move material from one planet to another, do you think
that life could have moved between the deep biospheres?
Yes. I also believe there may be a huge number of bodies that are like
planets that are not tied to stars. All we know is that we are tied to a
star. And we've seen a few other stars like ours. But that is no reason for
thinking that the formation of planetary bodies needs a star. It's only
because that's the only place where we've been able to look. If you had an
Earth-sized body floating by itself through space, we would not have had
any chance to observe it.
But its deep biosphere could keep ticking.
Ticking as it has here for billions of years.
So life could spread not just within solar systems but over greater distances?
Yes.
It's interesting that you still speculate about other planets. Some of your
work in this area - I'm thinking about your ideas regarding the surface of
the moon - is now seen as having been very wide of the mark.
I concluded that very fine-grained material seemed likely on the lunar
surface. The opposition believed that everything was volcanic - that the
moon was enormously volcanic at one time even though now one can't see the
littlest volcano on it. They said the flat plains are just lava fields and
flows. They got NASA to train the astronauts in the lava fields near
Flagstaff; when the astronauts came back, they said they hadn't seen any
ground that was anything like the area in which they trained.
What happened, to my great annoyance, was that the other side wanted to
ridicule me before the landing by saying, We think it's all hard stuff but
Gold thinks you're going to sink out of sight the moment you step onto the
surface. It was completely a slander. As I had written, when I step out of
a plane in Denver I'm stepping onto a mile of fine granular material -
because it all washed out from the mountains - and I don't sink out of
sight. I would not have worked on a camera to go to the moon if I had
thought it was not going to work. But it was published that Gold says when
they step off the ladder they will sink out of sight. And newspapermen, as
you probably know, read other newspapers, and these things tend to propagate.
Henry Cooper, in a 1969 New Yorker article about the Apollo missions,
quoted you as saying that geologists have no more business studying the
moon than studying the sun. You clearly don't have a very high opinion of
geologists.
That is true. They're so enormously fashion-conscious. It was very
unfashionable to think that the continents had moved. And then from one
year to the next it was declared that it was all right, that the continents
had moved. And then if you had any difficulty with the details of how the
continents had moved, you were a crackpot. They just follow a leader.
Wasn't it by recognizing a mistake widely accepted by geologists that you
first got interested in the deep Earth?
Yes. In the late 1940s I had read in a textbook on geology that at a depth
of more than 10 kilometers there can't be any pore spaces, because the
overburden of the rock is so great that it would crush them all out. I
discussed this with Fred Hoyle and said that these people evidently don't
understand what a pressure bath is. If there is liquid under pressure in
the pore spaces it will keep them open.
It's just as silly as the schoolboy who comes home from school and asks,
"How is it that I'm not squashed as flat as a pancake when there's 14.7
pounds per square inch on my body?" There can be pore spaces any way down
you like so long as the pressure of the fluid in the pores is reasonably in
balance with the rock pressing down from above.
What led you to think the liquids holding open these pores 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.
You clearly already had some sort of alternative model in mind.
I knew something that, to this day, the petroleum geologists in this
country don't seem to know - that astronomical observations had detected
large amounts of hydrocarbons on various planetary bodies in our solar
system. We didn't have the very good results that we now have from Titan
showing seven different hydrocarbons. But I knew that there were perfectly
sound astronomical observations showing hydrocarbons to be common on
planetary bodies. So it seemed natural that there should be similar
hydrocarbons within the Earth, slowly seeping out.
We don't see a lot of hydrocarbons just lying around on the Earth.
Once the atmosphere has a lot of oxygen, then any hydrocarbon gases that
come up are quickly turned into CO2.
Were there precedents for your idea that deep hydrocarbons are a normal
fact of planetary geology?
In the '60s, Sir Robert Robinson [a Nobel Prize-winning chemist and
president of Britain's Royal Society] said that petroleum looks like a
primordial hydrocarbon to which biological products have been added.
And what was the response?
The response was that I quoted his remark in many of my papers. But the
profession of petroleum geology did not pick it up. Mendeleyev [the Russian
chemist who developed the periodic table] in the 1870s had said much the
same thing, but Robinson had done a more modern analysis of oil and had
come to the same conclusion. And, in fact, the Russians have in the last 20
years done an even more precise analysis that completely proves the point.
The fact that Mendeleyev was in favor of a primordial origin of petroleum
had a great effect - you see, to most Russians, Mende-leyev was the
greatest scientist that Russia ever had.
Does it worry you that better international communications mean there's no
longer that opportunity for ideas disregarded in one place to find safe
havens elsewhere?
Yes. In fact, I wrote somewhere during the Cold War that I sometimes wish
the Iron Curtain were much taller than it is, so that you could see whether
the development of science with no communication was parallel on the two
sides. In this case it certainly wasn't.
I suppose it's understandable that pure scientists might reject a theory
just because they don't like it. But why did oil companies interested in
the bottom line not pay attention?
Because individual petroleum geologists who work for big companies never
wanted to admit that they could have done their planning and their
prospecting on an entirely wrong basis.
Perhaps there was little interest in your idea in the 1980s and '90s
because oil prices stayed low.
But that made it clear that the geologists' theory 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.
But not all of it is accessible at the moment?
It becomes accessible by recharging, and the recharging process I think I
completely understand. There's a stepwise approximation of the pore
pressure to the rock pressure - that will always be the case if the stuff
is coming up from below. You will not just fill up one reservoir at the top
in the shallow levels. It will always be underlaid by another reservoir,
and that in turn by another, and so on for a long way down.
And by pumping out oil from the highest reservoir you release the pressure
on the lower ones, allowing more oil to seep up.
Yes, the partial seal between the surface reservoir and the one below in
some cases appears to break open violently.
What's the evidence for that?
Many fields have produced several times as much as the initial testing of
their magnitude would have indicated. Some geologists frankly agree that
fields are refilling themselves - Robert Mahfoud and James Beck, who say
fields in the Middle East are refilling, and Jean Whelan, who has observed
a site refilling in the Gulf of Mexico - though they won't concede my
theory is correct.
Your onetime colleague Carl Sagan used to say that extraordinary claims
require extraordinary evidence. What evidence
did you have for geologists who found your claims about oil extraordinary?
In Sweden I produced oil by the ton from 6 kilometers down. Eighty barrels
we pumped, perfectly ordinary crude oil, entirely in nonsedimentary rock,
in granite. It looked like perfectly good stuff.
The Russians have drilled 300 holes in Tatarstan since the Swedish
experiments. They give me the credit for making the final determination
between the biogenic and abiogenic theory by finding petroleum in the
bedrock of Sweden.
Presumably the geologists said the oil had come in along cracks in the
granite.
They'd have a hard time persuading me.
Isn't there oil in the shales around the granite?
But the shales are nowhere deeper than 300 meters. I was down at 6.7
kilometers.
A number of physicists of your generation - your friend Hoyle, George
Gamow, Luis Alvarez, Freeman Dyson, Francis Crick (a physicist by training)
- have gravitated toward big questions about life, its origin, its workings.
I think that's what any competent scientist will do in the course of time.
But for you, the move from one topic to another seems to have been driven
by spotting other people's errors.
Yes, that's true. I was quite good at spotting a serious error, such as
when Harold Jeffreys [a geophysicist at Cambridge] gave a particular
formula for the damping of the Earth's free nutation [a slight nodding of
the axis of rotation]. I looked at this formula and then I rushed to my
friend Bondi and said, "Look, Harold thinks that if I have an object the
size of a pea in the middle of the Earth and it has a suitable viscosity,
it will cause the observed damping." I realized immediately it was rubbish.
Bondi and I wrote a correction paper, and it took us a year to get that
correction paper printed. Because the great Harold Jeffreys was still
standing on his hind legs and saying what he wrote was right.
In putting forward controversial ideas, does it help to have had the
experience of seeing your cosmological theories discarded? Did that
experience toughen you up?
I was always pretty tough. But the pulsar episode shaped my attitude more
than anything else. My idea that rotating neutron stars were responsible
for pulsars was totally ridiculed at an international conference. I was not
allowed to speak from the podium for five minutes in a two-day conference
because it was regarded as such a monstrous idea. That was in the spring,
and I think by November or December of that year, observations of the
pulsar in the Crab Nebula had confirmed every damn thing that I'd said -
confirmed that the frequencies of a young pulsar would be higher, confirmed
that good places to look would be supernova remnants, and a number of other
things.
After that, I was never going to compromise with other people's opinions
again: Just know the facts.
Don't people tend to overtrust what they are taught are facts?
Yes, absolutely. Not only overtrust, but they publish whenever they have a
positive result for an accepted theory, and if they have a negative result
they suppress it, or it gets suppressed by the referee.
So you have to know what to ignore: You have to have what I think Bondi
once called a ruthless disregard for the observations.
I kick myself for not having been firm enough sometimes. Some of my
colleagues have, on occasion, wanted me to step down from my high horse,
saying maybe there is something to what the others say. I should have
resisted that.
Searching out error means changing fields quite often, though. If you had
been more ambitious about your career, would you have stuck to a single
area of research?
Yes, but that did not attract me - I followed my own interests. And that
has been a handicap. The petroleum geologists dislike me, but very few of
them have any notion that I've worked in other fields - and been also
disliked, but found out right, you see. It should give them some pause. |
