Oil Doesn’t Come from Squashed Ferns and Fish??
In his later years, Gold challenged the belief, deeply held by American and British geoscientists, that oil is fluid concentrated from huge amounts of vegetation and animal remains that have been buried in the sediments over hundreds of million of years. Instead, he and many other geophysicists, most notably in Russia and China (5), for decades have been providing evidence that oil and natural gas are generated from hydrocarbon substances in the Earth’s crust that were “brought in from space when the Earth was formed.” (6)
When asked what first prompted him to think that oil and natural gas are generated from hydrocarbons present at Earth’s formation, Gold replied, “The astronomers have been able to find that hydrocarbons, as oil, gas and coal are called, occur on many other planetary bodies. They are a common substance in the universe. You find [large quantities of hydrocarbons] in the kind of gas clouds that made systems like our solar system…Is it reasonable to think that our little Earth, one of the planets, contains oil and gas for reasons that are all its own and that these other bodies have it because it was built into them when they were born?” (7)
When the interviewer replied, “That question makes a lot of sense. After all, they didn’t have dinosaurs and ferns on Jupiter to produce oil and gas,” Gold said, “That’s right. Yet, for some reason my theory was not heard. The theory that it was all made from fossils ha[s] become so firmly established that when the astronomers had perfectly definitive evidence on most of the other planets, it was just ignored, especially by the petroleum geologists who had, by then, called these things, ‘fossil fuels.’ So once they had a name, then every body believed it.
Link:
http://www.semp.us/publications/biot_reader.php?BiotID=182
No comments:
Post a Comment