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Issue 8.07 - July 2000

Fuel's Paradise

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.

By Oliver Morton

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.

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 to depths where moderate levels of heat and pressure "cook" it into oil and gas, which then migrate through the crust to the sorts of sedimentary structures best suited to trap them. Geochemists argue that the bulk of the world's hydrocarbons couldn't possibly reside in the Earth's mantle, as Gold posits; at that depth, hydrocarbons would react with the mantle, oxidizing into carbon dioxide, a process which, Gold's foes believe, is evident in the belching forth of carbon dioxide from the Earth's volcanoes. As Steve Drury, who reviewed Gold's book for Geological Magazine, puts it, "Any Earth scientist will take a perverse delight in reading the book, because it is entertaining stuff, but even a beginner will see the gaping holes where Gold has deftly avoided the vast bulk of mundane evidence regarding our planet's hydrocarbons."

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.

But he isn't always right. In the 1940s, early in his career, Gold developed the idea of a "steady-state universe" with Herman Bondi and Fred Hoyle, when the three of them left their wartime jobs in the British Admiralty and made their way back to Cambridge. (Bondi and Gold, both Viennese, had met as refugees, sleeping on the concrete floor of a British internment camp before their mathematical talents were pressed into service on naval radar programs.) The hypothesis has now been almost completely rejected in favor of the big bang theory. But for a while the steady-state idea, in which expansion was eternal and creation continuous, was the most satisfying scientific explanation of the universe around. Cosmologists now think it wrong, though few think it stupid.

Some Gold interventions, however, don't look so impressive in hindsight. 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. (Gold now thinks the moon, too, may well have a deep biosphere - as may many other bodies in the solar system.) And his ideas about hydrocarbons remain widely disputed.

But 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.

Listening to Gold make his case in his home in Ithaca, New York - where for 20 years he ran the Cornell Center for Radiophysics and Space Research - is to hear one of the 20th century's true scientific originals. His voice - still recognizably Viennese - is softer than it once was, but his combative spirit is undimmed. He still works on ideas ranging from the cosmological to the geophysical. He still gets a kick out of pointing to other people's mistakes. And he's still convinced, perhaps now more than ever, that he's discovered one of the great secrets of life.

Wired: You published your ideas about the deep hot biosphere in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 1992. What evidence since then has confirmed your beliefs?

Gold: A large number of people have found more microbial life in deep boreholes.

And in deep caves?

Yes, that's important.

So the buildup of evidence and interest must be gratifying.

Oh yes, it's certainly nice. But what I find a little distressing is that even though I published that article in '92 - I'd already submitted it to Nature in '88, but they wouldn't publish it - a lot of people describe their work as if they had made the discovery of a deep hot biosphere and it had never been thought of before.

You saw what you thought was evidence when you drilled in Sweden and found signs of life 6 kilometers down in the form of sludge and tiny grains of the mineral magnetite. What was the significance of that finding?

Magnetite is a chemically reduced form of iron oxide, which means it has less oxygen bound to the iron than more common iron oxides. The whole story of the deep hot biosphere is that oil coming up from below, without biology, will be food material for microbiology when it gets to a relatively shallow level where the temperature is not too high. For the microbes to use that oil as food when there's no atmospheric oxygen, they have to find oxygen in the rocks. There is plenty there, but there is not all that much in an easily removable form.

But what is easily usable is in common iron oxides - and when that's used, magnetite gets left behind.

Yes.

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.

What first made you think that there might be life at such depths?

It was in response to the long debate over how helium, which is concentrated in oil, could be associated with petroleum and biological debris. Helium has no affinity chemically with biological stuff. My argument was that the helium must have been swept up from below by petroleum from deep down, and that led me to the whole notion of the deep biosphere.

And you believe that the oily depths where you found magnetite represent the environment where life on Earth began?

Yes. 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.

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.

The current Mars program is focused on what are taken to be previously wet environments - lake beds and the like.

That is complete nonsense.

How did you feel when you first heard the claims about ALH 84001, the meteorite from Mars in which some people saw signs of life?

I think immediately the first information was that there were small grains of magnetite in there, and sulfides, and there was oil in there.

What they called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons?

That's oil. Sulfides and magnetite were immediately reported, all close together. And there was a calcite cement. All these things are typical of what you find down boreholes. To my mind they have a much stronger case than the one they made for saying this is biological.

If meteorites can move material from one planet to another, do you think that life could have moved between the deep biospheres?

Yes. I also believe there may be a huge number of bodies that are like planets that are not tied to stars. All we know is that we are tied to a star. And we've seen a few other stars like ours. But that is no reason for thinking that the formation of planetary bodies needs a star. It's only because that's the only place where we've been able to look. If you had an Earth-sized body floating by itself through space, we would not have had any chance to observe it.

But its deep biosphere could keep ticking.

Ticking as it has here for billions of years.

So life could spread not just within solar systems but over greater distances?

Yes.

It's interesting that you still speculate about other planets. Some of your work in this area - I'm thinking about your ideas regarding the surface of the moon - is now seen as having been very wide of the mark.

I concluded that very fine-grained material seemed likely on the lunar surface. The opposition believed that everything was volcanic - that the moon was enormously volcanic at one time even though now one can't see the littlest volcano on it. They said the flat plains are just lava fields and flows. They got NASA to train the astronauts in the lava fields near Flagstaff; when the astronauts came back, they said they hadn't seen any ground that was anything like the area in which they trained.

What happened, to my great annoyance, was that the other side wanted to ridicule me before the landing by saying, We think it's all hard stuff but Gold thinks you're going to sink out of sight the moment you step onto the surface. It was completely a slander. As I had written, when I step out of a plane in Denver I'm stepping onto a mile of fine granular material - because it all washed out from the mountains - and I don't sink out of sight. I would not have worked on a camera to go to the moon if I had thought it was not going to work. But it was published that Gold says when they step off the ladder they will sink out of sight. And newspapermen, as you probably know, read other newspapers, and these things tend to propagate.

Henry Cooper, in a 1969 New Yorker article about the Apollo missions, quoted you as saying that geologists have no more business studying the moon than studying the sun. You clearly don't have a very high opinion of geologists.

That is true. They're so enormously fashion-conscious. It was very unfashionable to think that the continents had moved. And then from one year to the next it was declared that it was all right, that the continents had moved. And then if you had any difficulty with the details of how the continents had moved, you were a crackpot. They just follow a leader.

Wasn't it by recognizing a mistake widely accepted by geologists that you first got interested in the deep Earth?

Yes. In the late 1940s I had read in a textbook on geology that at a depth of more than 10 kilometers there can't be any pore spaces, because the overburden of the rock is so great that it would crush them all out. I discussed this with Fred Hoyle and said that these people evidently don't understand what a pressure bath is. If there is liquid under pressure in the pore spaces it will keep them open.

It's just as silly as the schoolboy who comes home from school and asks, "How is it that I'm not squashed as flat as a pancake when there's 14.7 pounds per square inch on my body?" There can be pore spaces any way down you like so long as the pressure of the fluid in the pores is reasonably in balance with the rock pressing down from above.

What led you to think the liquids holding open these pores might be hydrocarbons left over from the Earth's creation?

Probably reading Arthur Holmes, who had written so many things that were egocentric expressions of opinion. He was the great father of geology - and still is - but I found his work quite shocking.

Shocking in what way?

Whenever he discussed some facts that were inconvenient, he would say that they should not be taken seriously, that it was purely due to chance. He far exceeded his information with the opinions that were mixed in - statements like, "Oil is not found in association with coal except accidentally, and not found in volcanic areas except accidentally." Look at the arc of Indonesia, from Burma to New Guinea: It's far more earthquakey than any other place we know. It makes lots of small, deep earthquakes, it's along exactly that belt that you have volcanoes - and you have petroleum along the whole of the line. "Never found in association with volcanoes except accidentally" - that's a hell of an accident.

So I spent years having these problems with geological texts. And then in the 1970s I had some discussions with King Hubbert, the leading American petroleum geologist, whose word counted as God's. I remember having lunch with him in Washington and saying, "Well, how can you account for the fact that we have oil-producing regions that are so large, that can go from Turkey to Iran to the Persian Gulf and under the plains of Saudi Arabia and on into the mountains of Oman, and the whole of that stretch is oil?"

Why would that be unlikely, given the traditional view of oil forming from organic matter in buried sediments?

Because the oil is all the same, while the sediments in that region are completely different: different ages, different materials. There's no sedimentary material that is uniform throughout the region, that has any coherence. And this just never struck him. His response was, "In geology we don't try and explain things - we just report what we see."

Hubbert's views changed the wealth of nations. The belief that oil would run out, and that those with a source could always increase the price, caused the early-'70s oil crisis. That, to my mind, is a completely stupid attitude that shifted many billions of dollars away from some countries and toward others.

You clearly already had some sort of alternative model in mind.

I knew something that, to this day, the petroleum geologists in this country don't seem to know - that astronomical observations had detected large amounts of hydrocarbons on various planetary bodies in our solar system. We didn't have the very good results that we now have from Titan showing seven different hydrocarbons. But I knew that there were perfectly sound astronomical observations showing hydrocarbons to be common on planetary bodies. So it seemed natural that there should be similar hydrocarbons within the Earth, slowly seeping out.

We don't see a lot of hydrocarbons just lying around on the Earth.

Once the atmosphere has a lot of oxygen, then any hydrocarbon gases that come up are quickly turned into CO2.

Were there precedents for your idea that deep hydrocarbons are a normal fact of planetary geology?

In the '60s, Sir Robert Robinson [a Nobel Prize-winning chemist and president of Britain's Royal Society] said that petroleum looks like a primordial hydrocarbon to which biological products have been added.

And what was the response?

The response was that I quoted his remark in many of my papers. But the profession of petroleum geology did not pick it up. Mendeleyev [the Russian chemist who developed the periodic table] in the 1870s had said much the same thing, but Robinson had done a more modern analysis of oil and had come to the same conclusion. And, in fact, the Russians have in the last 20 years done an even more precise analysis that completely proves the point. The fact that Mendeleyev was in favor of a primordial origin of petroleum had a great effect - you see, to most Russians, Mende-leyev was the greatest scientist that Russia ever had.

Does it worry you that better international communications mean there's no longer that opportunity for ideas disregarded in one place to find safe havens elsewhere?

Yes. In fact, I wrote somewhere during the Cold War that I sometimes wish the Iron Curtain were much taller than it is, so that you could see whether the development of science with no communication was parallel on the two sides. In this case it certainly wasn't.

I suppose it's understandable that pure scientists might reject a theory just because they don't like it. But why did oil companies interested in the bottom line not pay attention?

Because individual petroleum geologists who work for big companies never wanted to admit that they could have done their planning and their prospecting on an entirely wrong basis.

Perhaps there was little interest in your idea in the 1980s and '90s because oil prices stayed low.

But that made it clear that the geologists' theory and its predictions were wrong.

Maybe they were off by only a little - after all, the price is now rising steeply.

But that's only because of the OPEC cartel, which is held together still by the information that the oil is going to run out.

If it's clear that the fields are refilling, then of course the cartel greatly weakens, and the individual nations will try to outsell the others. So it's very important economically who is in the right.

How much more oil is there in your view of the world than in the view of traditional petroleum geology?

Oh, a few hundred times more.

But not all of it is accessible at the moment?

It becomes accessible by recharging, and the recharging process I think I completely understand. There's a stepwise approximation of the pore pressure to the rock pressure - that will always be the case if the stuff is coming up from below. You will not just fill up one reservoir at the top in the shallow levels. It will always be underlaid by another reservoir, and that in turn by another, and so on for a long way down.

And by pumping out oil from the highest reservoir you release the pressure on the lower ones, allowing more oil to seep up.

Yes, the partial seal between the surface reservoir and the one below in some cases appears to break open violently.

What's the evidence for that?

Many fields have produced several times as much as the initial testing of their magnitude would have indicated. Some geologists frankly agree that fields are refilling themselves - Robert Mahfoud and James Beck, who say fields in the Middle East are refilling, and Jean Whelan, who has observed a site refilling in the Gulf of Mexico - though they won't concede my theory is correct.

Your onetime colleague Carl Sagan used to say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. What evidence did you have for geologists who found your claims about oil extraordinary?

In Sweden I produced oil by the ton from 6 kilometers down. Eighty barrels we pumped, perfectly ordinary crude oil, entirely in nonsedimentary rock, in granite. It looked like perfectly good stuff.

The Russians have drilled 300 holes in Tatarstan since the Swedish experiments. They give me the credit for making the final determination between the biogenic and abiogenic theory by finding petroleum in the bedrock of Sweden.

Presumably the geologists said the oil had come in along cracks in the granite.

They'd have a hard time persuading me.

Isn't there oil in the shales around the granite?

But the shales are nowhere deeper than 300 meters. I was down at 6.7 kilometers.

A number of physicists of your generation - your friend Hoyle, George Gamow, Luis Alvarez, Freeman Dyson, Francis Crick (a physicist by training) - have gravitated toward big questions about life, its origin, its workings.

I think that's what any competent scientist will do in the course of time.

But for you, the move from one topic to another seems to have been driven by spotting other people's errors.

Yes, that's true. I was quite good at spotting a serious error, such as when Harold Jeffreys [a geophysicist at Cambridge] gave a particular formula for the damping of the Earth's free nutation [a slight nodding of the axis of rotation]. I looked at this formula and then I rushed to my friend Bondi and said, "Look, Harold thinks that if I have an object the size of a pea in the middle of the Earth and it has a suitable viscosity, it will cause the observed damping." I realized immediately it was rubbish. Bondi and I wrote a correction paper, and it took us a year to get that correction paper printed. Because the great Harold Jeffreys was still standing on his hind legs and saying what he wrote was right.

In putting forward controversial ideas, does it help to have had the experience of seeing your cosmological theories discarded? Did that experience toughen you up?

I was always pretty tough. But the pulsar episode shaped my attitude more than anything else. My idea that rotating neutron stars were responsible for pulsars was totally ridiculed at an international conference. I was not allowed to speak from the podium for five minutes in a two-day conference because it was regarded as such a monstrous idea. That was in the spring, and I think by November or December of that year, observations of the pulsar in the Crab Nebula had confirmed every damn thing that I'd said - confirmed that the frequencies of a young pulsar would be higher, confirmed that good places to look would be supernova remnants, and a number of other things.

After that, I was never going to compromise with other people's opinions again: Just know the facts.

Don't people tend to overtrust what they are taught are facts?

Yes, absolutely. Not only overtrust, but they publish whenever they have a positive result for an accepted theory, and if they have a negative result they suppress it, or it gets suppressed by the referee.

So you have to know what to ignore: You have to have what I think Bondi once called a ruthless disregard for the observations.

I kick myself for not having been firm enough sometimes. Some of my colleagues have, on occasion, wanted me to step down from my high horse, saying maybe there is something to what the others say. I should have resisted that.

Searching out error means changing fields quite often, though. If you had been more ambitious about your career, would you have stuck to a single area of research?

Yes, but that did not attract me - I followed my own interests. And that has been a handicap. The petroleum geologists dislike me, but very few of them have any notion that I've worked in other fields - and been also disliked, but found out right, you see. It should give them some pause.

Contributing editor Oliver Morton ([email protected]) wrote about Antarctica's Lake Vostok in Wired 8.04.

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