Dynasty
11-07-2002, 10:29 PM
...on a planet that is coming to grips with the fact that oil is finite and depleting...
This is a sentence fragment from an Anonymous post in a different thread.
It is the standard belief that oil is a fossil fuel created millions of years ago when dinosaurs and plants died (very simplified, I know). Therefore, it has always been believed that the world's oil reserves are finite. Eventually, we are supposed to run out of "dead dinsoaurs" to fuel our cars. However, this view of oil has run into a couple of roadblocks which I first about read in a science magazine article a year ago (forgot name of magazine).
First, the largest oil reserves in the Middle East have shown no signs of depletion despite decades of non-stop pumping. Measurements of these reserves show that they are at the same levels as when the pumping started so long ago. Pumping seems to have had no impact on them.
Second, the oil is not where the dinosaus and other prehistoric life were. For example, the American West was a bastion of the T-Rex and many other dinosaurs. Yet, the American West, other than Texas, is hardly a major oil reserve. At the same time, the Middle East is oil rich for no apparent reason. There's no correlation between where the dinosaurs lived in and where the oil is today.
These factors among other things has created a theory within the scientific community which contradicts the orginal oil origin theory. The theory is that oil is a natural by-product of inner-Earth's mechanics. It's theorized that the spining, churning, and other stuff that goes on in the center of the Earth is what is creating oil and that it rises towards the surface through certain randomly created paths.
Is anbody familar with any further articles/research on these ideas?
This would not be the first time that a widely held 20th century scientific belief was later completely refuted by a new theory. At one point, the scientific communty almost universly believed that the dinosaurs were killed of slowly by climatic change. Then, it was proposed that the were all killed nearly simultaneously by a catasrophic event. The catastrophic event theory was widely dismissed until a massive crater was found in the Yucitan peninsula dating at exactly the same time of the death of the dinosaurs. Now, the catastrophic event of a meteor crashing into Earth and wiping out nearly all life on the planet is the accepted truth.
This is a sentence fragment from an Anonymous post in a different thread.
It is the standard belief that oil is a fossil fuel created millions of years ago when dinosaurs and plants died (very simplified, I know). Therefore, it has always been believed that the world's oil reserves are finite. Eventually, we are supposed to run out of "dead dinsoaurs" to fuel our cars. However, this view of oil has run into a couple of roadblocks which I first about read in a science magazine article a year ago (forgot name of magazine).
First, the largest oil reserves in the Middle East have shown no signs of depletion despite decades of non-stop pumping. Measurements of these reserves show that they are at the same levels as when the pumping started so long ago. Pumping seems to have had no impact on them.
Second, the oil is not where the dinosaus and other prehistoric life were. For example, the American West was a bastion of the T-Rex and many other dinosaurs. Yet, the American West, other than Texas, is hardly a major oil reserve. At the same time, the Middle East is oil rich for no apparent reason. There's no correlation between where the dinosaurs lived in and where the oil is today.
These factors among other things has created a theory within the scientific community which contradicts the orginal oil origin theory. The theory is that oil is a natural by-product of inner-Earth's mechanics. It's theorized that the spining, churning, and other stuff that goes on in the center of the Earth is what is creating oil and that it rises towards the surface through certain randomly created paths.
Is anbody familar with any further articles/research on these ideas?
This would not be the first time that a widely held 20th century scientific belief was later completely refuted by a new theory. At one point, the scientific communty almost universly believed that the dinosaurs were killed of slowly by climatic change. Then, it was proposed that the were all killed nearly simultaneously by a catasrophic event. The catastrophic event theory was widely dismissed until a massive crater was found in the Yucitan peninsula dating at exactly the same time of the death of the dinosaurs. Now, the catastrophic event of a meteor crashing into Earth and wiping out nearly all life on the planet is the accepted truth.