Catastrophic Climate Change is a strawman created by the fossil fuel industry. And you are demonstrating the point I just made to fncceo in the thread about the Earth's wobble. Small is not zero. Weather is driven by the thermal energy in the air and sea. Increase that thermal energy and you will increase the energy in our weather, no matter the magnitude of the change.
I have questioned it being from Fossils since I studied this around 1966. I purchased for the company I worked for a wonderful text book on this subject, eg. oil production.
I kept wondering how fossils could get at depths of 30,000 feet in Earth and in significant numbers. It bothered me the story of calling this from fossils.
An Author maintains that oil is being produced in Earth today. He asserts the process of creating petroleum is not over. You might want to read his book.
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Twenty-five years ago this month, Thomas Gold published a seminal manuscript suggesting the presence of a “deep, hot biosphere” in the Earth’s crust. Since this publication, a considerable amount of attention has been given to the study of deep biospheres, their role in geochemical cycles, and their potential to inform on the origin of life and its potential outside of Earth. Overwhelming evidence now supports the presence of a deep biosphere ubiquitously distributed on Earth in both terrestrial and marine settings. Furthermore, it has become apparent that much of this life is dependent on lithogenically sourced high-energy compounds to sustain productivity. A vast diversity of uncultivated microorganisms has been detected in subsurface environments, and we show that H2, CH4, and CO feature prominently in many of their predicted metabolisms. Despite 25 years of intense study, key questions remain on life in the deep subsurface, including whether it is endemic and the extent of its involvement in the anaerobic formation and degradation of hydrocarbons. Emergent data from cultivation and next-generation sequencing approaches continue to provide promising new hints to answer these questions. As Gold suggested, and as has become increasingly evident, to better understand the subsurface is critical to further understanding the Earth, life, the evolution of life, and the potential for life elsewhere. To this end, we suggest the need to develop a robust network of interdisciplinary scientists and accessible field sites for long-term monitoring of the Earth’s subsurface in the form of a deep subsurface microbiome initiative.
A quarter-century ago this month, Thomas Gold, an Austrian-born astrophysicist from Cornell University, published a paper in these pages entitled simply, “The deep, hot biosphere” (
1). In this paper, followed by a book of the same title (
2), Gold suggested that microbial life is likely widespread throughout Earth’s subsurface, residing in the pore spaces between grains in rocks. Furthermore, he speculated that this life likely exists to a depth of multiple kilometers, until elevated temperature becomes the constraining factor. Gold hypothesized that life in subsurface locales is supported by chemical sources of energy, rather than photosynthetic sources, upon which surface life ultimately depends (
1). The nutrients that support this subsurface life are provided by both the migration of fluids from the depths of the Earth’s crust and the host rock itself, which contains both oxidized and reduced minerals. Although it is likely to be all microbial, Gold posited that the mass of subsurface life in this little-known biosphere was comparable to that present in surface environments. Gold thought that if there is life at depth, the rocks that have (or could produce) “hydrogen (H2), methane (CH4), and other fluids… would seem to be the most favorable locations for the first generation of self-replicating systems,” keenly aware that “such life may be widely disseminated in the universe” (
1). Moreover, Gold hypothesized that hydrocarbons and their derived products fuel chemosynthetic subsurface life and that these hydrocarbons are not biology reworked by geology, but, rather, geology reworked by biology (
2).
Although he did not have a doctorate, Gold (1920–2004) was highly recognized as a scientist, as evidenced by receiving a Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1985) and a Humboldt Prize (1979); membership in the National Academy of Sciences (1974); and induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1974), the Royal Society (1964), the American Geophysical Union (1962), and the Royal Astronomical Society (1948), among others. As an author of ∼300 scholarly papers, Gold had a penchant for contributing his thoughts to fields well beyond his own of astrophysics. In the foreword to Gold's book
The Deep Hot Biosphere, the theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson wrote, “Gold’s theories are always original, always important, usually controversial—and usually right” (
2). Stephen Jay Gould considered Gold as “one of America’s most iconoclastic scientists”
