I have been reading this controversy about whether Petroleum is a fossil fuel or a natural formation of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen ( water, co2, co) under earth - since seventies.

Anyone with the latest theories?

Hi, kmguru! Long time no see! Here is something that will give you some insight about the origin of petroleum - from helium and methane. It is the brilliant theory of Dr. Thomas Gold, an astrophysicist from Cornell University. This article has been published in our website of the Argentinean Foundation for a Scientific Ecology for about three years.

http://mitosyfraudes.8k.com/INGLES-2/FossilFuels.html = "Hydrocarbon Fuels Aren't Fossils!"

Here is something I found posted in sciforums thread: <b>Expose the Truth!</b> at http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=1115, by <b>Time/02112</b>, about Dr. Thomas Gold. He seems to know much more about Dr. Gold than me. Here is an excerpt of his post:

"So maybe we should finally pay attention to Thomas Gold. He says the world has an endless supply of oil and gas. Gold, a Vienna-born physicist, cosmologist and general scientific heavy lifter, founded and for many years directed the Cornell Center for Radiophysics and Space Research. In his 79 years he's authored more than 280 scholarly papers on subjects ranging from astronomy to zoology.


He's also a full-time heretic, periodically parachuting into some new scientific field and infuriating academic plodders there with some outlandishly bold new theory. More annoying, his theories usually turn out to be right. Worst of all, he thinks the orthodox have so gummed up the gates of knowledge that they were more open to breakthroughs 50 years ago. Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould has labeled Gold "one of America's most iconoclastic scientists." Says Gold himself: "In choosing a hypothesis there is no virtue in being timid ... [but] I clearly would have been burned at the stake in another age."

In 1947, fresh from pioneering wartime work on the development of radar, he used his research into high-frequency receptors to publish an entire new theory of mammalian hearing. Physiologists shrugged it off for 30 years. Until auditory technology evolved enough to prove him correct.

In 1959, when everybody thought the surface of the moon was frozen lava, Gold decided it was covered with dust from meteor impacts. Footprints of the Apollo astronauts will testify eternally that he was was right about that, too.

In 1967 astronomers trashed his suggestion that energy pulsating in the distant universe was the signature of collapsing stars. The subsequent observation of pulsars won two other scientists a Nobel Prize. And proved Gold correct.

In 1992 he predicted that Martian meteorites might contain fossilized microbes. Four years later NASA announced the same thing.

Now in a new book, "The Deep Hot Biosphere," Gold says the origin and bulk of biological life is not on the surface of the Earth where the birds and bunnies are, but deep within it. Moreover, that microscopic life force is fueled by an inexhaustible supply of petroleum constantly migrating outward from our planet's volcanic core.

Eight years ago, when Gold was still developing his theory, some geologists were so incensed by it they petitioned to have the government remove all mention of it from the nation's libraries.

"It was an effort at book-burning, pure and simple," Gold says, shuffling around a computer-buzzing, paper-littered attic study as energetically unkempt as he is. Most petroleum geologists, he says, "simply have no concept of the laws of physics at work" beneath the Earth's crust.

People need to understand, he says, that the long-held assumption that oil comes from the millennial composting of dinosaurs and ancient swamps has always been dubious, whatever school science books may say. His theory of a deep, hot biosphere doesn't just solve its contradictions, it sorts out in the process such minor matters as the origin of all earthly life and its relationship with the rest of the universe.

Is there any wonder it makes people nervous?

<b>Way Outside the Box</b>

What's unique about Thomas Gold, says astronomer Steve Maran of the American Astronomical Society, is that unlike most scientists who are content to "pursue the advancement of knowledge in small, incremental steps," Gold "comes up with new ideas by starting from the original principles" in some field where others have labored for years.

When that happens, he's often "treated like a curiosity that can't be taken seriously," Maran says. "But he always shakes things up in a useful way, often opens up entire new areas of thought. Some denounce him even as they profit from the push he's given their thinking."

"Gold's style is in turn charming, intriguing and exasperating: short on details (where the Devil lies) and long on fiats and suppositions," sighed eminent geochemist Harmon Craig of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, reviewing Gold's book in Eos, the journal of the American Geophysical Union.

But if Gold is right about subterranean microbes being the seeds of all life, and if they survive the Earth's next asteroid collision to restart evolution, he adds, "Let us hope that when new humans finally emerge and invent science they will have another Tom Gold to delight and exasperate them with his theories."

Here is some more about Dr. Gold, that seems to be quite an interesting character!

"After the war he went back to Cambridge where, impressed with his brilliance, administrators presented him with a prized four-year fellowship to do anything he wanted.


"I told them I would like to teach advanced physics," Gold remembers. "They said that was fine. But since I had never studied any physics, I had to learn it myself night by night, before each lecture."


In the process, he read widely on all sides of the subject and became convinced all physics was related. From that he published his steady-state theory, which held that whatever had happened once in the universe must be occurring someplace in the universe today.


That made a big splash in scientific circles and, says Gold, "I'm still not entirely sure it's wrong." From there he moved on in 1953 to become assistant to Britain's astronomer royal, who heads the Greenwich Observatory and holds one of the country's most prestigious intellectual posts.


There he says he accidentally discovered the ultrasound phenomenon now used to check out unborn babies. But his boss decided it had nothing to do with astronomy and tore down his laboratory, so Gold left for the United States.


He landed in Harvard in 1955, "either the youngest or the second youngest full professor on the faculty. I forget which." But he refused to live in Boston and detested commuting from the suburbs, so within four years he had migrated to a "much more livable" environment at Cornell.


He's been here causing trouble ever since.

Fueling Passion

Gold, who holds prestigious appointments to the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of London, turned his attention to petroleum during the energy crisis of the late 1970s. He has not been universally welcomed by industry geologists. Gold's hypothesis on the origin of petroleum amid deep hot life "is not very well defended," sniffed geoscientist Alton Brown of Atlantic Richfield in a review of "The Deep Hot Biosphere" in American Scientist last July. "We ... know too much about the subsurface and about petroleum geochemistry to seriously consider these ideas."


But Gold is used to being dissed. While scientists like Brown have traditionally sought to explain petroleum by looking in the ground, Gold says, he developed his theory by looking in the other direction.


Far from being an earthly substance, he says, petroleum and its component hydrocarbons are present throughout the universe. You find them in meteorites. You find them in captured interplanetary dust. You can detect them quite abundantly on one of the moons of Saturn. About all this there is no scientific argument.


As an astronomer and geophysicist, he says, "it always seemed absurd to me to see petroleum hydrocarbons on other planets, where there was obviously never any vegetation, even as we insist that on Earth they must be biological in origin."


Yet wherever earthly petroleum is found, even miles below ground, oil always contains biological material, such as the wreckage of old, dead cells. If "fossil fuel" wasn't formed from ancient plants and animals, how did that material get there?


Another puzzle bothered Gold, though he says it seems to concern few others: the gas helium. Helium is one of the essential elements of the universe, present in trace amounts everywhere in nature. As a so-called "noble" gas, it stays chemically aloof from other elements, never combining like, say, hydrogen and oxygen do to form a third substance like water. Yet the only place on Earth helium is ever found in abundance is with pools of petroleum underground.


What, Gold wondered, could explain that?


Then in 1977 a tiny research submarine probing deep beneath the Pacific Ocean near the Galapagos Islands discovered something that revolutionized our understanding of life.


More than 1 1/2 miles down on an ocean floor made otherwise barren by darkness and crushing pressure, the sub's floodlights revealed entirely new ecosystems living amid the scalding 600-degree heat and mineral-rich eruptions of subsea volcanic vents. On subsequent expeditions, scientists were astounded to find an entire food chain at the vents--blood red giant tube worms, albino crabs and other creatures--thriving on previously unknown forms of heat-loving microbes where no possibility of life was thought to exist.


That got Gold thinking.


Last year, in his book "Consilience," Harvard entomologist E.O. Wilson, a polymathic heretic like Gold, stirred the scientific pot by arguing that all forms of human knowledge are really branches of biology, and serve an evolutionary goal. But Gold goes further than that.


"Perhaps biology is just a branch of thermodynamics," he has written, and the history of life is just "a gradual systematic development toward more efficient ways of degrading energy. ... The chemical energy available inside a planetary body is then more likely to have been the first energy source, and surface creatures--like elephants and ... people--which feed indirectly on solar energy--are just a [much later] adaptation of that life to ... circumstances on the surface of our planet."

Endless Oil?

Working from that hypothesis, Gold's theory goes like this: Oil and gas were born out of the Big Bang and trapped in the Earth 4.5 billion years ago in randomly dispersed molecular form. But the intense heat of the Earth's volcanic core "sweats them out" of the rocks that contain them, sending them migrating outward through the porous deep Earth because they are more fluid and weigh less. In a region between 10 and 300 kilometers deep, the hydrocarbons nourish vast colonies of microbes where all of earthly life began, and where today there's a vastly greater mass of living things than exist on the surface of the planet. The migrating oil and gas "sweep up" the biological wreckage of this life as they percolate upward, together with molecules of helium, all of which eventually get trapped and concentrated for periods in near-surface reservoirs where oil is usually found.


As far out as all this may sound, in the years since Gold first noised the outlines of his theory, researchers throughout the world have documented extensively the presence of active microbes in the deep Earth under conditions of heat and pressure once thought impossible to sustain life.


Furthermore, some oil reservoirs long thought exhausted now appear to be mysteriously refilling. Gold considers the best proof of his program the extraction of 12 tons of crude oil in 1990 from a 6-kilometer-deep well drilled in the long-presumed oil-free granite of central Sweden.


Chris Flavin of World Watch Institute says he's found many elements of Gold's theory "pretty persuasive" in the light of such discoveries, and says there's much to cheer environmentalists. If Gold is right, he says, the greatest abundance of accessible hydrocarbons will be found in the form of natural gas. Gas is not only the cleanest-burning energy source right now, it promises "to be the bridge to the hydrogen economy in the future" which will be cleaner still, he says.


But skeptics remain.


"We know there's carbon deep within the Earth because that's where we find diamonds," says Nick Woodward, a geoscience program manager with the Energy Department. "And we know there's water, at least in small amounts, which, since it's hydrogen and oxygen, gives us the building blocks for petroleum hydrocarbons. ... "But whether that therefore means the source of all hydrocarbons is in the deep Earth, I think that's highly questionable."


Gold shrugs off such unbelievers. The scientific world, allegedly searching for truth, is really little more hospitable to it than when Galileo fell afoul of the Inquisition, he says.


"You know, I am very lucky that I received recognition and honors early in my career, so that by the time I started making real waves I already had stature," he says. "Even with my record I've had a terrible time getting some of these papers published. Without it nobody would touch me. ...


"The problem is this system of peer review" wherein established scholars in a field pass judgment on new papers before publication, he says. "That rewards small steps but discourages bold ideas and the very sort of cross-discipline thinking that can provide the greatest breakthroughs. I don't think there's any question that we produced more great ideas in the first half of the 20th century than we have in the second"--when peer review has ruled.


Nevertheless, Gold soldiers on. He's presently writing his memoirs of a lifetime of heresy. Chosen title: "Getting the Back Off the Watch."


© 2000 The Washington Post Company

Thanks Edufer for posting as I thought you would. I come to this section to collect links to post elsewhere for others to read. Sometimes it requires mind wide open to read without burning out a few hardwired neuonal junctions (Synapses). But few are willing to do that.

As to "all forms of human knowledge are really branches of biology, and serve an evolutionary goal" - of course it is. It is a part of the emergent property of this planet. Any one who understands the Complexity Science (see 'a new kind of science' by Wolfram) could attest to that.

As you might expect, some russians claim to have come up with the theory long before anyone else:
"In 1951, the modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins was first enunciated by Nikolai A. Kudryavtsev at the All-Union petroleum geology congress. Kudryavtsev analyzed the hypothesis of a biological origin of petroleum, and pointed out the failures of the claims then commonly put forth to support that hypothesis."
http://www.gasresources.net/Introduction.htm

I looked into it a couple of months ago, after meeting someone who claimed there was nothing to worry about oil running out. In a sense, it seems he was correct, but what you have to see is that even when reserves are replenishing, they arent doing so at a faster rate than we are using up. So we have to tread carefully here.
And here:
http://www.csun.edu/~vcgeo005/Energy.html

And all I can say finally is read it all carefully and compare the theories and ideas. And dont pay too much attention to people who hype up individuals records and say that shows they are right. Comparisons to Galileo tend to be easy to make, but overused, by people on both sides of any arguments.
Furthermore, finding 12 tons of oil beneath granite rocks 6 kilometres down might sound like good news, but extracting it will have cost far more energy.

Furthermore, finding 12 tons of oil beneath granite rocks 6 kilometres down might sound like good news, but extracting it will have cost far more energy.

Very true. But those countries who depend on OPEC mercy could start digging under their backyard.....who knows what they could find. We need new powerful RADARs to image at that depth.

Radar doesnt work at that depth as far as I know. You mean that method whereby pressure waves from explosions are detected and the differing velocities trhough different materials gives a picture of the different layers of rock etc. I just cant rememberr what its called. And that is improving, I think the oil and gas industry have had great success with increased use of computers and better more modern sensors. But six kilometres down is a long, long way to drill.

Sometime ago, I worked with a Geologist who had developed a multispectral wave guide type contraption (there is no precedence) to find oil and gas. He wanted to design a specialized software as a inference engine and hence my involvement. Anyway, such a technology can be further developed to see what is deep under ground but am not sure high far deep one can go.

Multipsectral wave guide type? If its not inquiring into patented technology areas etc, what wavelengths were used and how did it work?

Last I heard, he was playing with ELF as a carrier frequency similar to using powerline as a signal carrier. Apparently his partner had some experience with long range ELF communication that travels through earth better than high frequency. He was also playing with GHz wave guides which by itself did not produce any usable information. It generated too much noise possibly because the place we were playing with had a lot of oil-sands underneath. We were trying to get a reference point for signal discrimination.

Very interesting stuff....
thanks
:)

Furthermore, finding 12 tons of oil beneath granite rocks 6 kilometres down might sound like good news, but extracting it will have cost far more energy.

Furthermore, this wouldn't happen. Granite is generally bedrock, i.e. it's an igneous intrusive about 600 - 800 degrees C. Oil is found in sedimentary rocks almost always laying on top of bedrock. The temperature of oil formation is somewhere around 50 to 200 degrees C. So in effect, if sedimentary rocks had been somehow overlain by granite, the heat would've cooked any petroleum product to a useless sludge.

HHmm. Did you read the links I gave on the other suggestions about oil formation, such as the russian theory? I am not a petroleum geologist, and an indifferent organic chemist, but they seem plausible at least.

Here is another controversial theory. Wonder if they are connected?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A13080-2003Mar23

Ahhh, that. one of those theories theres not enough evidence really to say with certainty one way or the other. At least from the standpoint of a layman.

News stories do not equal scientific credibility unless they are direct press releases by specific entities (i.e., NASA, EPA, etc.). Journalists are notorious for fucking up perfectly good science.

Layman and NASA

I wonder if we had a NASA to guide us during our caveman days? :D

"Journalists are notorious for fucking up perfectly good science."

Indeed. Maybe I should start a thread.....

I wouldn't deny the possibility of abiotic hydrocarbon generation, but there's already a pretty robust model for generation by buried and heated organics isn't there? All the factors that are used nowadays to find oil and gas seem to quite consistently successful. They even know which kinds of organic materials produce which kinds of hydrocarbons - algae for oil, woody material for gas etc.

As for that granite, the intrusion could have occurred well before the oil matured and migrated. Even granite can be a reservoir if it's got enough fracture porosity. Although I don't know even the first details of this (just what's been put on this forum), isn't it more likely that there's just an unidentified source rock that's allowed this granite to be charged?

…but there's already a pretty robust model for generation by buried and heated organics isn't there?
One thing that makes me think oil is abiogenic, is that the traditional theory speaks of organic matter being decomposed and transformed by heat and pressure into oil. This means that organic material (forests, sabanas, jungles), were buried under thick layers of sediments and the pressure exerted by the huge weight of those sediments, along with heat from the mantle?) converted the organic matter in to oil.

That could explain coal, of course, as we find coal mines not too far from the Earth’s surface, even in huge mountains. Sediments covered dinosaurs, and we find fossils from 500 million years ago – buried under a very thin layer of between 2 meters and 5 meters, depending on the geological seism occurred in the region.

But the figure of 3000 meters thick sediment layers in all places in the world with oil wells, just don’t makes sense to me. Where did it come from such an amount of rocks and sands to form a uniform sediment 3000 meters (and much more) thick? We would need almost another small planet or a huge asteroid for such an input of material.

Also, the amount of oil extracted and consumed since 1850, and the known reserves underground, would make the size of jungles and forest covered by sediments too large to fit in the small piece of land of the ancient Pangea. Nope. It does not add up.

Professor Gold’s theory makes a lot of sense – but I guess the Establishment is not too happy with his theory. It was neither happy then when Galileo said the Earth was circling around the Sun, and not the other way around. Eppur si muove, folks, eppur si muove!

Edufer, I think the reason that we find shallowly buried fossils is precisely because they are shallowly buried. That's not to say, however, that there are no fossils buried at depths of many kilometres. In fact, oil companies employ palaeontologists of a sort to determine the age of microfossils that are brought up from such depths so that the drillers know what layer they're in.

It's easy to underestimate the rate at which sedimentation can occur, but bear in mind that an entire mountain range can be eroded to flat plains within a hundred million years. Where does the mountain end up? - As pebbles and sand and mud, accommodated in a nearby subsiding basin. Kilometres of material are not deposited simultaneously all over the planet, so you do not need another body to explain the great volumes. Rocks are recycled constantly - uplift, erosion, deposition, uplift etc.

Also, I think that the reason only shallow coal mines are exploited is more to do with engineering and economics than geology. You can't pump coal through a kilometres-long pipe, and it is of too low a value to deep mine.

The earth is mostly molten. It is this hot because of a thermonuclear reaction happening deep at the center of the magmasphere where the heavy nuclear-unstable elements concentrate. This thermonuclear reaction produces degradation products that include carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, as well as all the other lighter elements. The gradation products work their way up and into the Earth's crust where they slowly form petroleum by chemical recombination. The gasses that power most volcanoes also originate in the Earth's core.

A thought came to me after reading the above post:

Some say, we have a large nuclear reactor at the center of our planet. Others say, it is a hogwash. It occurs to me that, if the heaviest elements settled at the center during the formation of our planet - such could be the case with the other planets too. Now, if a planet brokeup after the formation, then we could find large chunks of concentrated heavy nuclear material in the asteroid belt. May be we should check that to prove the nuclear reactor theory. Sounds logical?

A strong supporting point for petroleum as a fission-fussion product of the magma core is that natural gas contains the nobel gases. These can only be made through nuclear processes. Some natural gas wells contain as much as 4% helium. The noble gases play no role in living mater, and are chemically inert. They can only come from a nuclear reaction. This fact rules out every other theory.

But what if that helium was material from a previous sun? While heavy tends to sink, and light stuff to rise, if you have the right solution, you could suck helium down there.

The hydrocarbon potential of Sweden's Siljan Ring was evaluated, and the report is available here. (www.edge.ou.edu/news/SILJANJuly2003.PDF) The Siljan Ring is the result of a late-Devonian meteorite impact in Precambrian granite, which produced a fracture porosity of up to 5 percent. This porosity was enough for the granite to act as reservoir for (presumably biogenic) hydrocarbons from Ordovician bituminous shales.

The key points of the biogenic/abiogenic debate are outlined in this marvellous discussion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fossil_fuel). Although both proponents are persuasive, I must say that I am still not convinced that abiogenic hydrocarbons make a significant contribution to the world's economic petroleum reserves.

undefineddar slate blueBut what if that helium was material from a previous sun? While heavy tends to sink, and light stuff to rise, if you have the right solution, you could suck helium down there.
Volcanos such as Mount Saint Helens are powered by the gases that accumulate beneath that area of crust. This shows that the gases produced by the Earth's core are continually produced and constantly building up to keep these volcanos erupting on regular scheduals.

Erring Flatley,

It's true that volcanic eruptions can be made more explosive by sudden depressurisation of their contained volatiles, but why do you think that these gases originate in the Earth's core? My impression was that volatile-rich magmas are derived from the subduction of hydrated oceanic crust. This introduces water and other volatiles into the mantle, causing its partial melting. I would be interested to hear what leads you to believe otherwise.

Sorry, gone a bit off topic there.

No you are not off topic. For a tight proof a person would have to sample the gas being put off by a volcano. Or, analyse the gas trapped in the "sponge" of recently formed magma rock, such as from Kilauea. But I think of it this way: If the gas comes from subduction, then there must be some place that the plate is superducting, that is spreading, with magma creating more plate. I know of no such place. In order to be destroying the plate at one place, it must be created at another.

New ocenic crust is forming as we speak at oceanic spreading centres such as the Mid Atlantic Ridge and the East Pacific Rise. In Iceland you can actually see this process occurring on dry land. I don't think that there is really in doubt among scientists as to the reality of constructive and destructive plate margins.

When lava contacts water it is extremely explosive. There is no explosive activity on the oceans' floor. With all the deep submersable research that has been done, no one has found or documented any deep sea plate spreading. It is an unconfirmed hypothesis. The lava flows in iceland are a result of magma circulation beneath the Earths crust; it is a local phenomenon like yellowstone. Iceland is growing taller, not wider. Kilauea is a simular phenomenon but on a much larger scale. Sampling of the gases produced by volcanoes will show the presence of nobel gases. That will be absolute proof.

Water can contribute to explosive volcanism, true. But haven't you ever seen footage of pillow lavas meeting the sea in Hawaii? They don't explode - they just freeze and crack and freeze and crack.

You think there that seafloor spreading is an unconfirmed hypothesis. In reality the case is watertight:
Magnetic stripes of alternating polarity arranged parallel to oceanic spreading centres.
Continental palaeomagnetic data showing that rock formation occurred at different latitudes.
Intercontinental distribution of flora and fauna.
Evidence of glaciation in Australia (from when it was at polar latitudes).
Visual matching of the continents.
Direct measurement of plate motion by satellites (the Atlantic is widening at ~2cm per year).
Seismic focal mechanism studies of mid ocean earthquakes show them to be extensional, with strike-slip motion on transform faults.
Sidescan sonar shows ridge-parallel faults and volcanic texture at mid ocean ridges.

Hotspot volcanism might well contribute to Iceland's activity, but is beyond dispute that it straddles the Mid Atlantic Ridge.

Helium has indeed been detected at volcanic fumaroles, but I fail to see how this represents "absolute proof" for the abiogenic origin of petroleum. Uranium and thorium undergo radioactive decay, therefore petroleum is abiogenic? The Earth's mantle contains primordial helium, therefore petroleum is abiogenic?

undefineddar slate blue
Volcanos such as Mount Saint Helens are powered by the gases that accumulate beneath that area of crust. This shows that the gases produced by the Earth's core are continually produced and constantly building up to keep these volcanos erupting on regular scheduals.

Or, having been down there for a while, they have been coming up with the magma, coming out of solution as the temperature drops. Thermal pressure below, above, the gas comes out of solution to maintain the pressure, much like nitrogen in a diver's blood.

sorry, just playing devil's advocate and making you think.

I used to live inside the Kaneohe, Hawaii crater. (Kaneohe means crater.) That crater is about 8 miles across with walls reaching above 3000 feet on the land side. On the ocean side it is of course below water. When lava rises below the ocean it is explosive in the extreme due to the steam produced below sea level. No, there is no such thing as "primordial" nobel gases embeded in rock. Any nobel gases present at the time Earth was molten would have been in the atmosphere at the time the first crust formed. The Earth's magnetic field is cause by circulation of the magma within the magmasphere. A large convective current within the magmasphere is caused by the heat of the nuclear reaction at the core of the Earth. The vast quantities of water, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and other lighter elements found on the Earth's surface have been formed in the nuclear reaction in the Earth's core and exited to the surface of the Earth via volcanic activity. If it were not for the nuclear reaction in the core producing these elements, the Earth would be as dead as the moon, which does not have a reaction in its core and no volacanic activity. Kilauea volcano is the result of a plume of magma convection reaching to the Earth's crust from the core. It carries with it much of the gases produced in the core. Circulation of the magma then proceeds to the edges of the Pacific basin, where the gases accumulate and form volcanoes. This is the origin of the "ring of fire". Kilauea is unique in its mode of formation, it is the only volcanoe produced in this manner. The Hawaiian Islands chain gives evidence of the permanence of this magma plume produced by the Earth's core. Around lesser ocean basins than the Pacific, gases accumulate at a rate slow enough to penetrate the Earth's crust and chemically condense into petroleum within crustal voids. The Earth's petroleum deposites are greatest at these places, that is the edges of smaller ocean basins, due to this.

Almost all of the elements in the earth were made in stars. I don't think the reactions in the core could account for all of the elements in the crust. I believe that there are decay reactions that result in helium isotopes, but again, I don't think that could account for everything. Explain something that resonates with logic. I know alot, but not really enough. If there's another peice, it'll fit with what I already know.

That post about helium in solution, like I said, was speculation, just me being devil's advocate for a bit.

I did not say all of the elements in the Earth's crust are formed by nuclear reaction in the Earth's core. But! I said most of the lesser weight elements are formed in the core and then exit from the magma via volcanic explosion. This is particularly noticable for hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon since they are so readily present in our everyday lives. But another example is the very low density layer of helium that tops the atmosphere. The hugh deposites of limestone that cover much of the Earth were formed by sea creatures and animals but they used elements that originated in the core as well. As material in the magmasphere moves out of the magmasphere to the surface of the Earth via volcanoes the volume of magma decreases so that the crust of the Earth is continually shrinking. This results in the buckling of the crust forming mountains and depressions. (Sorry if my last piece was oversized font. I am still learning how to run this program.) If the elements on Earth were made in the stars, how did they get from the stars to the Earth and why does not the moon have these elements? Since the moon and Earth formed at the same time from the same material, both should have the same elements if all the elements came from stars. The elements that have a greater abundance on Earth came from the Earth's core. There is no place else from which they could come.

Erring Flatley,
I disagree but it's very interesting stuff. How about starting a new thread about the origin of Earth's elements, or about alternatives to plate tectonics? Maybe some more people will be moved to comment.

Actually current theory is that the motion of the molten magma is altered based upon tactonic movement, when a plate is push below another it constricts the flow and eventually is recycled into the molten magma flow.

This means the very surface of the planet is constantly changing and this is proven with the single continental mass known as 'Pangaea'. If the earth was to follow the pattern of absolute loss to magma becoming hardened crust, then we would not exist now as the core would have died along time ago, if not the entire planet.

Some suggest the core is cooling, in reality it probably is but it will never set absolutely solid thanks to the earths orbit, spin and the moons gravitational effect.

The material is the remains of supernovas. The lighter elements are formed through fusion, and then the heavier ones through a particle accelerator effect when the sun explodes, last I knew. A big cloud of this material was the origin of the solar system. The origin of the moon is in debate, last I knew, but it does have many of the same elements.

Is Earth's Core a Nuclear Fission Reactor? ...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A13080-2003Mar23

Anything new lately?

I would suggest so Kmguru, Afterall when the Mantel becomes hardened, does it not trap nuclear materials that otherwise would be going critical? Makes you wonder how such materials are formed in the first place, perhaps information on the creation of Einsteinium would shed some light on the matter.

As I'm sure you know, Fission is energy being released and leaving waste material, and Fusion is the Grail of matter transposing to energy and leaving no waste.