Deep Hot Biosphere

Former Cornell University astro-physicist Thomas Gold last year published “The Deep Hot Biosphere” a fascinating account of the origins of life, with enormous implications for the future of transport. Gold completely pulls the rug from under the commonly believed theory that oil is a fossil fuel and quite scarce. In fact it is of mineralogical origin and plentiful because it wells up from the magma, driven upward into the mantle from huge chemical stocks deep inside the earth. The fossil fuel theory, Gold points out, fails to account for the uniformity of oil over areas of the earth of quite different climate and vegetation, or the presence of oil below areas without sedimentary rock. It cannot explain recharge – that oil fields ‘miraculously’ refill some years after being pumped. Fossils in oil are the remains of plant forms that have lived off the mineral nutrients of oil, Gold says. Hydrocarbons have been detected in many planetary bodies, most of which have never had any vegetation to become ‘fossilized’ into hydrocarbons, making the mineralogical origins of hyrdocarbons the only logical explanation. Further, Gold says, oil is now being discovered in drill-holes of far greater depth (6 to 7km) than can possibly be supported by the fossilized vegetation theory of the we’re-running-out-of-it crew.