Thomas Gold's Abiogenic Oil Theory: Fuel's Paradise

From Wired the article Fuel's Paradise on how 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".

Endless Oil being pumped up from the Earth's core

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..

for millions of years, very deep in the soil and under lots of pressure and heat... Yeah, we've heard it.

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.

Critics argue Gold has made mistakes too...

.. he isn't always right. In the 1940s, early in his career, Gold developed the idea of a "steady-state universe"... Cosmologists now think it wrong, though few think it stupid... 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.

Opponents misrepresented his theory saying he said that the dust layer would be several feet thick, therefore making astrounauts "drown in dust". Gold says he was proposing something several INCHES thick, which was indeed verified by Apolo astronauts

...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.

Other interesting Thomas Gols stories on the same article

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.

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.

About the Origin of life

.. 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.

About life ON THE MOON

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.

And those residues HAVE been identified...

Perhaps there is something to Gold's theories after all...

Thomas Gold died on June 22nd, 2004 of a heart attack. He was 84 years old. Who will pick up his torch and keep researching The Deep Hot Biosphere and Abiotic Oil ?