The strange heresies of Thomas Gold
If the maverick astronomer 's theories about oil are right, we'l be able to drive for a long time
Sometime next year, from off the
coast of Japan, we should find out if he is right. Working onboard the Chikyu,
a 210-meter ship equipped with a huge drilling platform, a team of geologists,
engineers and oceanographers led by Japan's Center for Deep Earth Exploration
hopes to drill the world's deepest hole. The 8.5-inch aperture will penetrate
seven kilometers under the earth's crust to pierce its mantle and solve some of
our most profound mysteries. For the first time, human eyes may see the molten
rock that makes up 84 percent of Earth's volume. According to astronomer Thomas
Gold, they may tap into the source of the planet's energy and the cradle of
life itself.
If correct, Gold's theory will
change the way we think about everything from energy to our role in the
universe. Corporate and state power contingent on the vagaries of the oil
market could disintegrate. Environmental policies would have to adjust to a new
paradigm. Even cultural values premised on the uniqueness of life would have to
be made anew. For decades Gold's theory has enraged the scientific
establishment. "Every fact is against him," says an Amoco geochemist.
"Completely absurd," adds a Colorado School of Mines geologist.
"A waste of time," says another, "on about the same level as saying
sugarplum fairies will cure cancer."
Thomas Gold typically generates
these sorts of responses. An iconoclast astronomer educated at Cambridge
University, Gold spent his career challenging conventional wisdom with ideas on
everything from the nature of the universe to the workings of the inner ear. Controversy
has been common with Gold, but the response was never more explosive than it
was to his theory about the secrets of the mantle. He put forth his most
heretical theory after he retired from Cornell University, in 1987. His critics
contended he had aged into a wild crank; an unrepentant Gold defended his
theory, until he died last year, at the age of 84, in Ithaca, New York. Will
the world's deepest hole be Gold's final redemption, or will it sound the death
knell for his long-challenged theory?
Gold's idea was at first simple. Scientists
have envisioned the earth as a sterile chunk of molten rock with a surface
civilized by a film of life that processed elements into complex molecules. Over
time some of these products of living chemistry were rescrambled into molecules
such as methane and octane and other hydrocarbons otherwise known as petroleum,
which all rest within the first few kilometers of the earth's eggshell-like
crust.
Along with astrophysicist Steven
Soter, Gold proposed a modified scenario in 1980. After hydrocarbons--in
particular methane, the main component of natural gas--had been found on
Jupiter and the moons of Saturn, Gold and Soter hypothesized that the earth,
too, might have been endowed with methane and other hydrocarbons long before
life came around. Primordial abiotic hydrocarbons--i.e., molecules not created
biologically--might bubble up to mingle with biologically generated
hydrocarbons. If so, their serpentine movements through cracks and fissures in
the crust would explain their mysterious presence at the bottom of certain
lakes and steaming out of hydrothermal vents.
It was, they admitted, a
relatively simple hypothesis. It would "doubtless turn out to be in places
oversimplified and overstated," but they hoped it would at least spur
research. They added a few throwaway lines--a half dozen in a five-page
article--about the possibility of abiotic hydrocarbons furnishing a source of
energy. It was interesting to ponder but not a practical concern. Nobody had
ever drilled deeply into the crust, let alone the mantle underneath it. Why
bother? The best oil fields in the world offer oil and gas from holes that are
just three kilometers deep. Even a hole twice that depth would cost upwards of
$4 million to drill.
The implications of Gold's theory
are profound. According to the Department of Energy, the planet's natural-gas
supply is fixed somewhere around a half-trillion barrels of oil. If Gold is
right, such estimates are off by several orders of magnitude. Instead
"there would bean inexhaustible supply," says industry geologist
Barry Katz. What that may mean for a civilization whose progress is defined by
finite energy resources boggles the mind. "It's the golden fleece,"
says Katz.
It wasn't long before libertarian
economists and conspiracy theorists latched onto Gold's hypothesis. "The
world is running into oil, not out of it," claimed energy economist Peter
Odell, who went on to say that the OPEC-induced energy crisis of the 1970s was
driven by market forces. He felt there was no need to fear, because by 2060
"abiogenic oil will, if need be, enter the market."
Gold wasn't particularly
interested in the economic implications of his theory. "It was pretty
clear that exploitable deposits are very different from an abundance of
inaccessible material," says Gold's colleague astrophysicist Edwin
Salpeter. "Gold usually stressed the scientific implications more than the
economic ones," adds Soter. Then again, Gold had a tendency to exaggerate
for effect.
From the beginning of his career,
Gold was the sort of genius who irritated other scientists. Over and over he
invaded new fields and challenged basic principles, offering little more than
incisive logic and qualitative evidence done in broad strokes. Born in Vienna
in 1920, Gold fit the part of the maverick. A few years after qualifying toski
professionally in Switzerland, he went to Cambridge, where as a master's
student at Trinity College he shocked the medical establishment with a theory
of hearing that challenged Hermann von Helmholtz's accepted theory. The inner
ear, Gold claimed, generated its own tone.He was laughed out of medicine. By
the age of 28, he had moved on to astronomy. In 1948 he and two fellow graduate
students, Fred Hoyle and Hermann Bondi, presented a new theory of the nature of
the universe. Their steady-state theory reigned for years before being
supplanted by the big bang.
In 1959 Gold was appointed John L.
Wetherill Professor of Astronomy at Cornell. His bold ideas continued to earn
him enemies. By the late 1960s conference organizers had become so enraged with
Gold's contrarianism--this time his theory was that recently discovered pulsars
were actually rotating neutron stars--that they refused to allow him five
minutes to speak from the floor.
The rub was that, more often than
not, Gold was right. His theories on hearing and pulsars are now accepted
wisdom. Sure, he didn't bother much with details, but "he was undeniably
brilliant," says geologist Barbara Sherwood Lollar. "He always
advocated theories that were unorthodox," says Salpeter, "and many
turned out to be right."
By the time he turned his
attention to geology, Gold was a towering figure. Along with being chairman of
astronomy at Cornell, where he had hired Carl Sagan, Gold was a member of the
National Academy of Sciences and director of Cornell's Center for Radiophysics
and Space Research. "In person he was a polite European fellow,"
remembers former Cornell grad student Thomas Zemanian. He charmed acolytes with
his Viennese accent and his mad-scientist enthusiasm. He skied the Aspen slalom
course every year--and in gold-medal times. "He didn't suffer fools,"
says U.S. Geological Survey geologist emeritus David G. Howell, "and he didn't
worry if people disagreed with him."
In 1966, as NASA prepared to send
astronauts to the moon, Gold calculated that contrary to geologists' prediction
of a rocky lunar surface--the condition astronauts trained for--the moon would
be covered in a fine powder. "Most geologists said, 'Absolutely not.
There's no moon dust, not even a hundred-millionth of an inch of dust,'"
says Salpeter. "Tommy would exaggerate a little and say, 'Look, the
astronauts will sink in to their navels.'" Geologists complain that NASA
spent six of seven surveyor missions attempting to find out if its manned
mission might sink in dust. Kenneth Deffeyes, a petroleum geologist at
Princeton, was appalled. "That was a big, multibiltion-dollar
program," he says, "and most of it was spent refuting Gold's
idea." In the end, as was often the case, Gold was both right and wrong. The
astronauts sank in dust up to their ankles. "So the geologists said, 'He
was wrong!'" says Salpeter. "But the geologists were completely
wrongby a factor of 100 million. Gold was wrong by a factor of three."
Then Gold came up with another
outrageous theory: that petroleum resided not just in the crust, where oil
explorers spent their time hunting for it, but at far greater depths, in the
mantle. When energy analyst Gregg Marland gathered geologists in Oak Ridge,
Tennessee in 1983 to discuss the abiotic-gas theory with Gold, tensions were
running high. Astronomers and physicists might have found Gold's theory
reasonable enough, but most petroleum geologists thought it was ridiculous. There
were obvious scientific objections: Hydrocarbons would be destroyed at the high
temperatures and pressures of the mantle, for one thing. Geochemists,
furthermore, had their reputation to consider; energy agencies and oil and gas
companies funded their research because it was supposed to help find oil and
gas, yet according to a 1975 study, just as much oil and gas would have been
found if the holes had been drilled at random. Since then they had worked to
build a solid theory of hydrocarbon formation, and they weren't about to let
Gold shoot holes in it.
The three-day meeting quickly
devolved into confrontation. Gold was unhappy during much of it. "He felt
he was outnumbered and picked on," said Marland. Amoco's John Winters left
the meeting saying he would never again speak publicly with Gold because the
esteemed astronomer was "out of the realm of rational science." "I've
never been at a meeting quite of this character," said the moderator,
Alvin Weinberg.
"People shake their fists at
me," Gold told one magazine. "If they could, they would burn me at
the stake." Despite all the rancor, no one disputed that Gold's deep
abiotic gas existed.
Geochemist Michael Lewan worked
with Winters at Amoco in the 1980s, analyzing organic-rich rock and running lab
experiments on how to turn it into oil. "I don't think anybody has ever
doubted there is an inorganic source of gaseous hydrocarbons," he says. Another
geologist acknowledges, "I have no problem with the idea that there is
abiogenic methane." Gold's theory had exceeded the boundaries of petroleum
geology. If the stuff was down there, it was probably dispersed and certainly
deeply buried. Nobody could see how to make a buck finding and selling such
gas, so it was irrelevant, no matter how enlightening.
But Gold kept pushing. Hadn't
geologists similarly excoriated meteorologist Alfred Wegener's 1915 theory of
continental drift, mocking it for 50 years before it was accepted? "I
don't think I have anything to apologize for," he said to The
Vancouver Sun. "I am almost always right." As geologists' resistance
grew, so did Gold's claims about abiotic gas. In 1980 Gold and Soter wrote that
"much of the petroleum that has been recovered" originated from the
burial of biological debris. By 1986 he was telling reporters that only some oil
and gas originated from biological materials. By 1999, in his second book on
the topic, Gold claimed that no oil came from biological debris, although he
allowed that some gas did.
As a science, geology lacks both a
consistent experimental method and a vigorous theoretical wing. This has led
some physicists, as one academic geologist notes, to "sometimes think
we're dumb." But petroleum geology is perhaps the most advanced
subdiscipline within the field. And the story of hydrocarbons has been told
many times. According
to petroleum geologists, hydrocarbons start to form when sediments enriched
with the corpses of organisms--mostly plankton--get slowly buried. As the
sedimentary layer sinks to 7,500 feet or so, the pressure and heat are right
for sediments to turn, over millions of years, into oil-rich rock. (If
sediments slip deeper than 18,000 feet, heat and pressure destroy the oily
molecules.) Tectonic movements force the oil in sedimentary rock into
circuitous movements in the crust. If the migrating oil meets up with a porous
rock with a solid cap on it,it will get trapped. The lucky driller who pierces
that rock gets a Cadillac.
A
wide array of evidence supports this three-act story of burial, migration and
entrapment. Pieces of chlorophyll and shell are found in oil and gas. Trails of
high electrical resistivity can be used to track oil and gas migrations
underground. One can even heat a lump of organic-rich sedimentary rock in the
lab and turn it into oil. Finally, nearly every oil and gas field has been
found not in lifeless igneous rocks thrust up from the mantle, where Gold's
abiotic gas supposedly resides, but in sedimentary rocks formed from material
sloughed off from the life-teeming land and seas.
Gold
had an alternate explanation for nearly every piece of evidence petroleum
geologists put forward to defend their biotic theories. The microfossils in
oil? Microbial contamination after the fact, he said. Evidence of migration?
Irrelevant, he said, because abiotic hydrocarbons drifting up from the mantle
would move in the crust the same way biotic ones did. Ditto for the
transformation of organic sedimentary rock into petroleum. The rock had already
soaked up abiotic hydrocarbons. Sedimentary rocks as the primary locale for oil
and gas fields? Self-fulfilling prophecy, he said. Nobody bothered to look in
igneous rocks.
And
yet, save for a few stray supporters such as David G. Howell and independent
oil explorers Michel Halbouty and Robert Hefner, Gold's claims fell on deaf
ears. "I think 95 percent of professional geologists would disagree with
Gold," says one University of Southern California petroleum engineer. Gold
needed evidence. He needed to discover hydrocarbons in a place where they
couldn't possibly have formed biologically.
Gold
found a receptive audience in Sweden. In the mid-1980s, energy officials there
could be described as desperate. Sweden's environmentally concerned populace
had condemned the nuclear reactors that hadpowered the country since the early
1970s. With no known domestic source of oil, gas or coal, however, it remained
unclear how the Swedes might replace nuclear power. But Sweden did have the
Siljan Ring, a perfect test site for Gold's inorganic-gas theory. Nearly 400
million years ago a three kilometer-wide meteor crashed into the crust
there,fracturing it to a depth of 50 kilometers and leaving behind Europe's
second-largest crater. No organic sediments were present to have produced oil,
gas or coal in the traditional way, but the cracks could have allowed Gold's
inorganic gas to bubble up. Gold had suggested the notion to Swedish officials
in the early 1980s, and after some research they decided to drill a $25
million, six-kilometer-deep hole in the crater to search for the gas. Then the
state power board's advisory committee issued a report calling the chances of
success remote. Although the notion of mining the sites of meteor strikes
wasn't unheard of--others had proposed drilling to tap into geothermally heated
water--some officials worried the country might appear foolish. The government
pulled the plug on the funding.
Gold
remained determined. A private holding company was set up to fund the project
in partnership with government agencies. With talk of a $100 billion reserve,
people anted up, and drilling began in June 1986. Gold's detractors weren't
impressed. In their eyes Gold had crossed the line from science into
boosterism. Forbes ran an article reporting that Gold had received
$640,000 for the drilling. According to the magazine, an American drilling
supervisor mistakenly announced on Swedish TV that the hole had produced a
massive reservoir. Within months share prices had risen from 10,000 kronor to
107,000.
The
rock proved unyielding. By September 1986, after plowing through 6.3I
kilometers, the drillers had found only a small bit of oily sludge. Gold
claimed victory--"my theory is now on much firmer ground," he
said--but skeptics chalked it up to contamination from drilling fluids. The
drilling contractor abandoned the hole and pleaded bankruptcy.
While
geologists cheered Gold's failure, across the Atlantic in Ontario methane was
streaming out of the same kinds of Precambrian granite Gold had drilled in
Sweden. Since the turn of the century Canadian miners had told tales of
flammable gases wafting out of their mines, miles away from any ancient
biological debris. "But nobody had tackled it scientifically,"
remembers Barbara Sherwood Lollar, then a Ph.D. candidate in geology at the
University of Waterloo. "All this press and money were going into the
Siljan," she says. "Then a couple of people here in Canada said, 'We
know the gas is here. Let's go to the mines and take some samples.'" Punching
a hole into the wall of the mine, she says, was like opening a can of soda. There
was gas in the rock everywhere.
Sherwood
Lollar set to work analyzing the gas, but she ultimately turned to other
research. Definitive data on the gases wouldn't emerge from her work for years.
As a young academic interested in securing tenure, "you want to be sure
you're not working in an area that some people would feel is crackpot,"
she says. Gold had "given the field a black eye. People heard 'abiotic
gas' and put you into the category of crank."
Other
evidence emerged at Cornell. Thomas Zemanian, then a grad student, spent five
years building an apparatus to test if hydrocarbons could be stabilized by
pressures of the mantle, as Gold had speculated. By 1989 he had, contrary to
expectation, proved they could. But when he sent out his paper for publication,
the anonymous peer reviewers were livid. Zemanian moved on to other things.
Trying to support Gold's theory with experimental data--the lack of which
continued to condemn it in scientific circles--"just isn't the kind of
thing that pays the bills," he says. Zemanian now works for the Department
of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Lab. His Cornell research remains
unpublished.
Gold
plugged away in Sweden. "He was a believer in this idea," says
Howell, "and because of the resistance and because he had retired, he kind
of became evangelical." More money was drummed up for another project. In
1991 Gold extolled the Siljan region as a "world-class prospecting area
for gas and oil" with a total volume "bigger than the volume of the
Kuwaiti oil fields." But that hole also rendered inconclusive results. Out
came a small quantity of oily sludge, which caused the same old squabbles: Gold
claimed vindication; critics dismissed his find as the result of contamination
from distant sediments or drilling fluids.
But
then Gold found something in the hole. More than 50 kilograms of a stiff black
putty had oozed up from the bottom of the fissure. Drillers, judging it an
"uninteresting, malodorous nuisance of no commercial value," as Gold
put it, had thrown most of it away. But Gold got his hands on a small plastic
bag's worth, which he set about analyzing. What he found was of
"extraordinary scientific value," he laterwrote. It was
magnetite.
A
magnetic form of iron, magnetite is found in igneous and sedimentary rocks,
mostly in large crystals. Geochemists scoffed that the stuff Gold found was
only a by-product of lubricants used in the drilling, but Gold thought
otherwise. Something had processed this magnetite - it was particularly
fine-grained-and dumped it down there. It was time for another radical
proposition.
In
the early 1980s Gold developed a theory of what he called the deep hot
biosphere. Accepted wisdom held that all life requires sunlight, but Gold
didn't see any plausible reason for that. If inorganic gases had been welling
up from the mantle for millennia, as he believed, some microbe must have
emerged to feed on them. To figure it out, "you or I would probably start
reading the literature," says John Zollweg, a researcher who worked with
Gold at Cornell. "But that wasn't Tommy's approach. His was 'I'm a
cosmologist. Let me think about things.'"
There
had been hints that microbial life might exist in the depths. Since the 1930s
oil drillers had claimed to have found microbes in their oil wells. In the late
1970s all manner of bizarre lifeforms were found around "black
smokers"--fissures in the seafloor that stream superheated liquids from
below--in waters far too deep for sunlight to penetrate. Clearly the world of
microbes had barely been charted. In 1977 microbiologist Carl Woese discovered
not just a few new species of microbes but an entirely new kingdom: the
archaea.
What
if these creatures were not thrilling extensions of surface fife, Gold asked,
but represented some unknown biosphere in the rocks?What if life evolved not on
the surface but from down below? In fact, Gold speculated, the subsurface of
the planet provided an ideal nursery for early life. It was vast, warm and--if
one accepted Gold's theory about inorganic gases--energy rich, too. Gold
figured that if microbes were present in just the first six kilometers, even if
they were as rare as Siberian tigers, their empire would be at least as big--if
not bigger-than our familiar one in the light. "Just imagine the
volume" of a deep biosphere, says microbial geochemist Jan Amend. "The
subsurface could harbor more living carbon than all the green plants, soil bugs
and ocean critters combined."
Gold
considered geology parochial because it painted Earth as unique. He viewed
Earth as one planet among many, unique in some ways, ordinary in others. Conditions
inside our planet are not unique, Gold knew. "Two or three miles
down," says Cornell soil ecologist David Wolfe, "at least a few
planetary bodies in our solar system are almost identical to Earth." If
there were a deep hot biosphere on Earth, there could be more on other planets
rotating around our sun. If Gold is right, scientists shouldn't look for
extraterrestrial life on planetary bodies; they should look inside them.
The
basis for Gold's bold conjectures was questionable at best. The supposed deep
oil microbes had been dismissed as contaminants from the drill bit or
elsewhere. In the early 1980s Carl Woese's methodology wasn't held in high
regard in the scientific community. Rather than coaxing his microbes to survive
in his lab, where they could be studied, Woese presumed their existence by
analyzing bits of nucleic acid RNA in his samples. Blacksmoker ecosystems were
dark, true, but ultimately they too depended on life giving sunlight. Their
oxygenated seawater came thanks to the exertions of sun-loving plant
life.
In
the 19th century Charles Darwin suggested that life may have originated in a
"warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, lights,
heat, electricity, etc., present." Lab simulations of the warm little pond
seemed to support Darwin's scenario. According to Gold's friend Fred Hoyle, the
notion that something as complex and thermodynamically improbable as life could
form out of a bit of ooze was about as believable as a jet airliner being
assembled during a hurricane in a junkyard. But that was the story, and the
scientific establishment was sticking to it. In 1983 Gold submitted his paper
on the deep hot biosphere to Nature. It was rejected.
By
the 1980s the certainties around the origin of life, the planet's energy budget
and the scale of microbial life had started to crumble. A series of discoveries
suggested the early earth was more forbidding than had been thought. Meteor
craters were found on the moon, much larger and older than those on earth. If
the early solar system was as violent as the moon scars suggest, geologists
said, the earth could not have escaped unscathed. Yet fossil evidence
established that photosynthesizing life-forms emerged not long after an active
meteor period. This didn't add up. Such meteors would have sterilized the
surface for thousands of years. Life's first ancestors could have survived only
if they had been entrenched in some deep, hidden corner. Nobody knew where that
corner might be--hydrothermal vents were one suggestion-but many agreed that
Darwin's little pond was no longer so welcoming.
The
accepted view on the planet's endowment of methane and microbes had also been
called into doubt. In the late 1980s government geologists discovered that the
planet's sea floors and permafrost were littered with ice-like compounds called
methane hydrates. Previously thought to exist only in the solar system's outer
reaches, methane hydrates form when methane leaks out into cold, high-pressure
conditions. Ifthere was as much methane hydrate on earth as there appeared to
be, the planet must hold 100 times more methane than previously believed.The
same goes for microbes. As the molecular techniques Woese had been scorned for
came to be accepted, microbiologists discovered they had underestimated the
extent of the microbial world by a factor of 100. To top it off, microbiologist
Derek Lovley had isolated a new microbe from the bottom of the Potomac River in
1987. It breathed rust and excreted magnetite.
In
1992 Gold exercised his privilege as a member of the National Academy of
Sciences to get his paper on the deep hot biosphere published in the academy's
journal without peer review. The paper dropped like a bomb onto fields ranging
from microbiology to astronomy and oceanography.USA Today ran a frontpage
article. If there were a deep hot biosphere, it "could prove to be one of
the monumental discoveries of our age," Physics World wrote. Not
everybody was so charged up. "A lot of people just said, 'Rubbish,'"
says University of Washington astrobiologist Roger Buick. "We do not yet
have enough solid observations to say this is so," a microbiologist told The
New York Times. The idea of a living kingdom deep in the crust may have sparked
imaginations, but few scientists had the wherewithal to actually look for
it.
Three
years later, thanks to energy officials worried about microbes eating through
buried nuclear waste containers, the kind of ecosystem Gold had
envisioned--living things requiring no sun, no oxygen and nothing that resulted
from the two--was found. In 1995 scientists from the Pacific Northwest
Laboratory analyzed samples from wells dug into a layer of hardened lava called
the Columbia River basalts. The amazing thing wasn't that they found evidence
of microbes there but the kind of microbes they appeared to be. These organisms
could live in the oxygen-starved darkness by feeding on hydrogen. This
"subsurface lithoautotrophic microbial ecosystem" (or SLIME) lived
off abiotic gases in the lifeless rock alone.
The
hunt was on for the deep hot biosphere. In 1997 the National Science Foundation
earmarked $6 million a year for inquiries into life in extreme environments--in
scalding hydrothermal vents, under miles of ice and deep underground. In 1998
NASA created the Astrobiology Institute, doling out $15 million a year to
search for the origins of life. One arm of it was devoted to drilling deep into
the earth's crust. Searching for life under the seafloor likewise rose to the
top of the Ocean Drilling Program's research agenda.
Experimental
evidence of a deep hot biosphere started to accumulate quickly. In 1998
Princeton geomicrobiologist Tullis Onstott found microbes living 2.7 kilometers
underground in eastern Virginia. Later he discovered signs of microbial life
more than 3.5 kilometers down in a South African gold mine. In June 1998 one of
Woese's proteges, a University of Georgia microbiologist, calculated that the
underground biomass could equal all the planet's marine and land plants. In
2002 another deeply buried SLIME was discovered. In the pore spaces of igneous
rock under Lidy Hot Springs in Idaho, microbes were feeding on hydrogen
produced by reactions between hot water and rock, exhaling methane.
While
most of these deep microbial worlds exploit the interior's production of
hydrogen rather than methane, evidence suggests that methane too is abundant in
the crust, formed inorganically as Gold had suggested. In 1999 chemists at Oak
Ridge exposed iron-rich rocks to seawater under conditions similar to those
beneath the ocean and produced methane. Sherwood Lollar's mysterious gases in
the Canadian Shieldwere similarly formed in the water-filled fractures of
ancient rocks. As scientists looked for the microbial world they guessed might
be feeding on methane, oceanographers inadvertently discovered just that in the
spring of 2005, nearly a kilometer under the Atlantic. At the Lost City
hydrothermal field of 60-meter-tall creamy white spires and cliffs, seawater
trickling into iron-rich mantle rocks exudes life-giving methane and other
gases. Scientists still don't know how life originated, but as for where, they
are closer to an answer: Look down.
Even
as evidence grew for the deep hot biosphere, Gold's theory of abiotic
hydrocarbons remained an object of derision in geological circles. In 1993, for
example, when the U.S. Geological Survey published a collection on natural gas
that included a contribution from Gold, dozens of irate academic and industry
geologists petitioned the agency. "They wanted me fired, and they wanted
the book withdrawn," says Howell, who spearheaded the project. Gold
responded by filing a $1 billion lawsuit against 36 industry and academic
geologists for libel, assault and slander. The suit was dismissed shortly
afterward.
Gold's
critics didn't bother to read his books, either. "It was more than I had
time for," says Lewan. Kenneth Deffeyes also admits he never read Gold's
books. A 2004 textbook penned by geologists from the USGS, Stanford and
ExxonMobil recalls Gold as a misguided scientistand notes that his abiotic-gas
theory was criticized by "nearly all geochemists and petroleum
geologists." The deephot-biosphere theory was in "conflict with
conventional concepts of the earth's biosphere."Gold's theory kept making
the rounds only because its supporters "use many of the same tactics the
supporters of scientific creationism use to ridicule evolutionary theory."
To detractors such as industry geologist Katz, the study of abiotic
hydrocarbons isn't even real science. "It's almost like a religion with
some of these people," he says. "This is something a lot of people
want to believe," adds Deffeyes,"because, wow, oil fields will refill
themselves; we will just drill deeper, and there won't be any
problem."
Nobody
knows whether a huge store of methane lies deep in the mantle. All scientists
can say with certainty today is that the methane we do have is primarily
biologically derived, with a smaller amount created inorganically in the crust.
The deep methane could be there and we just haven't been able to access it yet.
Perhaps we never will. The need to prepare for a post petroleum age has
probably become urgent enough to render moot hunts for elusive reserves of gas.
But new endeavors to study the depths continue apace. In Sweden, microbiologist
Karsten Pedersen hopes to circumvent the problems of contamination and pressure
differentials that plague deep research by plugging directly into the deep
biosphere. Blessed with ample funding through Sweden's nuclear-research
program, Pedersen is studying deep microbes from a lab situated in a man-made
cave system carved 500 meters under the granite.
And
the scientific community awaits the results from the Chikyu. It may take a year
for the drilling to reach the mantle, but many of the scientists involved
expect to find life there. What we will learn remains to be seen. What's clear
is that over the course of a few decades, Gold's heretical ideas have effected
a revolution in our understanding of our place in the universe.
By
the late 1990s the indomitable professor had stopped skiing. "He had bad
arthritis in his hands," says Howell. "He wasn't as astute in
conversation." But his scientific conviction never faltered. "He was
championing his theories right up until he went to the hospital," says
Robert Hefner. Gold died in June 2004.
Today few scientists doubt the
existence of the deep hot biosphere. And deep microbial life feeding on abiotic
gases may be the rule, not the exception, inside planets similar to ours. It's
another ego-bruising blow: First Copernicus told us the sun didn't revolve
around us, then Darwin said we descended from animals. Now it appears we're not
the lead characters on the main stage of life; we're just a sideshow. Thomas
Gold wasn't right on all the details--not by a long shot--but then again, few
revolutionaries are.
Sonia Shah
