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Here's a breaking news story about a huge discovery of methane gas reserves. The bad news is this methane is burping up into plumes from the arctic ocean into the atmosphere from holes in the ice that are 3,000 feet across. Russian scientists say they have discovered thousands of these holes emitting methane plumes from the arctic shelf. According to Igor Semiletov of the Russian Academy of Sciences, methane gas is 20 times more harmful than carbon dioxide. Semiletov has studied these methane plumes for years but most of that time they were only about 30 meters in diameter. Semiletov...

PASADENA , Calif. - NASA's Cassini spacecraft has revealed for the first time surface details of Saturn's moon Hyperion, including cup-like craters filled with hydrocarbons that may indicate more widespread presence in our solar system of basic chemicals necessary for life.

For the first time, scientists have found complex, multi-celled creatures living a mile and more below the planet’s surface, raising new possibilities about the spread of life on Earth and potential subsurface life on other planets and moons. Nicknamed “worms from hell,” the nematodes, or roundworms, were found in several gold mines in South Africa, where researchers have also made breakthrough discoveries about deep subterranean single-cell life. The two lead researchers, Gaetan Borgonie of the University of Ghent in Belgium and Tullis Onstott of Princeton University, said the discovery of creatures so far below ground, with nervous, digestive and reproductive...

Are we living at the beginning of the Age of Fossil Fuels, not its final decades? The very thought goes against everything that politicians and the educated public have been taught to believe in the past generation. According to the conventional wisdom, the U.S. and other industrial nations must undertake a rapid and expensive transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy for three reasons: The imminent depletion of fossil fuels, national security and the danger of global warming. What if the conventional wisdom about the energy future of America and the world has been completely wrong? As everyone who follows...

Researchers at KTH have been able to prove that the fossils of animals and plants are not necessary to generate raw oil and natural gas. This result is extremely radical as it means that it will be much easier to find these energy sources and that they may be located all over the world. “With the help of our research we even know where oil could be found in Sweden!” says Vladimir Kutcherov, Professor at the KTH Department of Energy Technology in Stockholm. Together with two research colleagues, Professor Kutcherov has simulated the process of pressure and heat that occurs...

(PhysOrg.com) -- In what can only be described as a mammoth undertaking, scientists, led by British co-chiefs, Dr Damon Teagle of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, England and Dr Benoit Ildefonse from Montpellier University in France, have announced jointly in an article in Nature that they intend to drill a hole through the Earth’s crust and into the mantle; a feat never before accomplished, much less seriously attempted.

A new computational study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals how hydrocarbons may be formed from methane in deep Earth at extreme pressures and temperatures. The thermodynamic and kinetic properties of hydrocarbons at high pressures and temperatures are important for understanding carbon reservoirs and fluxes in Earth. The work provides a basis for understanding experiments that demonstrated polymerization of methane to form high hydrocarbons and earlier methane forming reactions under pressure. Hydrocarbons (molecules composed of the elements hydrogen and carbon) are the main building block of crude oil and natural gas. Hydrocarbons contribute to the...

A new computational study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals how hydrocarbons may be formed from methane in deep Earth at extreme pressures and temperatures. The thermodynamic and kinetic properties of hydrocarbons at high pressures and temperatures are important for understanding carbon reservoirs and fluxes in Earth. The work provides a basis for understanding experiments that demonstrated polymerization of methane to form high hydrocarbons and earlier methane forming reactions under pressure. Hydrocarbons (molecules composed of the elements hydrogen and carbon) are the main building block of crude oil and natural gas. Hydrocarbons contribute to the...

A new study demonstrates how high hydrocarbons could be formed from methane deep within the Earth, aside from the compression and heating of ancient animal remains over the eons. Fused-methane oil would be far less common than your typical petroleum, of course, but the study shows abiogenic hydrocarbons could conceivably occur in some of the planet’s high-pressure and high-temperature zones.

LIVERMORE, Calif. -- A new computational study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals how hydrocarbons may be formed from methane in deep Earth at extreme pressures and temperatures. The thermodynamic and kinetic properties of hydrocarbons at high pressures and temperatures are important for understanding carbon reservoirs and fluxes in Earth. The work provides a basis for understanding experiments that demonstrated polymerization of methane to form high hydrocarbons and earlier methane forming reactions under pressure. Hydrocarbons (molecules composed of the elements hydrogen and carbon) are the main building block of crude oil and natural gas. Hydrocarbons...

Last August, just two days into a research cruise to study methane gas spewed into the Gulf of Mexico by the Deepwater Horizon gusher, Texas A&M University oceanographer John Kessler turned to one of his colleagues and said, "Well, it looks like it might be gone. What do you think?" The huge wallop of methane burped up from deep inside the earth was, in fact, missing. Kessler and his colleagues now report in Science that a huge swarm of gas-gobbling bacteria swelled to consume nearly all of the estimated 200,000 tons of methane dumped into the gulf. ..... Besides providing...

DEEP UNDERWATER, and deeper underground, scientists see surprising hints that gas and oil deposits can be replenished, filling up again, sometimes rapidly. Although it sounds too good to be true, increasing evidence from the Gulf of Mexico suggests that some old oil fields are being refilled by petroleum surging up from deep below, scientists report. That may mean that current estimates of oil and gas abundance are far too low. Recent measurements in a major oil field show "that the fluids were changing over time; that very light oil and gas were being injected from below, even as the producing...

IT'S crawling with life down there. A remote expedition to the deepest layer of the Earth's oceanic crust has revealed a new ecosystem living over a kilometre beneath our feet. It is the first time that life has been found in the crust's deepest layer, and an analysis of the new biosphere suggests life could exist lower still. On a hypothetical journey to the centre of the Earth starting at the sea floor, you would travel through sediment, a layer of basalt, and then hit the gabbroic layer, which lies directly above the mantle. Drilling expeditions have reached this layer...

A newly discovered type of oil-eating microbe is suddenly flourishing in the Gulf of Mexico. And the microbe works without significantly depleting oxygen in the water, researchers led by Terry Hazen at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory ... the bacteria may have adapted over time due to periodic leaks and natural seeps of oil in the Gulf.

The Gulf of Mexico ecosystem was ready and waiting for something like the Deepwater Horizon blowout, and seems to have made the most of it, a new scientific study suggests. Petroleum-eating bacteria - which had dined for eons on oil seeping naturally through the sea floor - proliferated in the cloud of oil that drifted underwater for months after the April 20 accident. They not only outcompeted fellow microbes, they each ramped up their own internal metabolic machinery to digest the oil as efficiently as possible. The result was a nature-made cleanup crew capable of reducing the amount of oil...

The oil and gas that fuels our homes and cars started out as living organisms that died, were compressed, and heated under heavy layers of sediments in the Earth's crust. Scientists have debated for years whether some of these hydrocarbons could also have been created deeper in the Earth and formed without organic matter. Now for the first time, scientists have found that ethane and heavier hydrocarbons can be synthesized under the pressure-temperature conditions of the upper mantle —the layer of Earth under the crust and on top of the core.The research was conducted by scientists at the Carnegie Institution's...

Washington, D.C. are reporting laboratory evidence supporting the possibility that some of Earth's oil and natural gas may have formed in a way much different than the traditional process described in science textbooks. Their study is scheduled for Nov./Dec. issue of ACS' Energy & Fuels, a bi-monthly publication. Anurag Sharma and colleagues note that the traditional process involves biology: Prehistoric plants died and changed into oil and gas while sandwiched between layers of rock in the hot, high-pressure environment deep below Earth's surface. Some scientists, however, believe that oil and gas originated in other ways, including chemical reactions between carbon...

They paved paradise and, it turns out, actually did put up a parking lot. A big one. Some 700 feet deep in the waters off California's jewel of a coastal resort, Santa Barbara, sits a group of football-field-sized asphalt domes unlike any other underwater features known to exist. About 35,000 years ago, a series of apparent undersea volcanoes deposited massive flows of petroleum 10 miles offshore. The deposits hardened into domes that were discovered recently by scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and UC Santa Barbara (UCSB). Their report—co-authored with researchers from UC Davis, the University of Sydney...

If I may, I would like to rebut or add a little objectivity to the flood of “Peak Oil” articles circulating around. When I see another crisis looming in the balance, and dramatized articles that warn of the “Dangers of Peak Oil,” I must question the validity or how this will effect the world, the USA, and you and I personally, and if indeed a crisis is at hand. As for world oil, if you ask the right questions, there are several new technologies/methods/alternatives and new finds that can easily supply enough hydrocarbon fuel for the next century or more....

AOL News (March 4) -- Scientists have uncovered a powerful source of a leading greenhouse gas that is venting into the atmosphere at unprecedented rates. The permafrost beneath the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, a relatively shallow section of the Arctic Ocean, has been pumping 7.7 million tons of methane into the air each year -- roughly the amount released into the atmosphere by the rest of the world's oceans combined. The researchers, who report their work in the March 5 issue of Science, caution that their findings in this previously unstudied region raise more questions than answers. The amount of...

Earth's chemical energy powered early life through 'the most revolutionary idea in biology since Darwin'For 80 years it has been accepted that early life began in a 'primordial soup' of organic molecules before evolving out of the oceans millions of years later. Today the 'soup' theory has been over turned in a pioneering paper in BioEssays which claims it was the Earth's chemical energy, from hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, which kick-started early life. "Textbooks have it that life arose from organic soup and that the first cells grew by fermenting these organics to generate energy in the form...

Isotope geochemistryEarly water on Earth Geologists have long thought that Earth’s first 500 million years were as hot as Hades, dubbing this time frame the Hadean. The high temperatures would have prevented liquid water from condensing on the surface. But new findings on zircon grains, Earth’s oldest known terrestrial materials, suggest that the Hadean might have hosted liquid water. Recovered from the metamorphosed sediments of the Jack Hills in western Australia, the zircon grains are dated to be more than 4 billion years old and are the only geological evidence available to provide insight into the first 500 million years...

The surprising increase in methane concentrations millennia ago, identified in continental glacier studies, has puzzled researchers for a long time. According to a strong theory, this would have resulted from the commencement of rice cultivation in East Asia. However, a study conducted at the University of Helsinki's Department of Environmental Sciences and the Department of Geosciences and Geography shows that the massive expanse of the northern peatlands occurred around 5000 years ago, coincident with rising atmospheric methane levels. After water vapour and carbon dioxide, methane is the most significant greenhouse gas, resulting in about one fifth of atmospheric warming caused...

About half of the oil in the ocean bubbles up naturally from the seafloor, with Earth giving it up freely like it was of no value. Likewise, NASA satellites collect thousands of images every year, but some of them get passed over because no one thinks there is a use for them. Scientists recently found black gold bubbling up from an otherwise undistinguished mass of ocean imagery. Chuanmin Hu, an optical oceanographer at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg, and colleagues from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Massachusetts–Dartmouth (UMass), found that they could...

Scientists in Washington, D.C. are reporting laboratory evidence supporting the possibility that some of Earth's oil and natural gas may have formed in a way much different than the traditional process described in science textbooks. Their study is scheduled for Nov./Dec. issue of ACS' Energy & Fuels, a bi-monthly publication. Anurag Sharma and colleagues note that the traditional process involves biology: Prehistoric plants died and changed into oil and gas while sandwiched between layers of rock in the hot, high-pressure environment deep below Earth's surface. Some scientists, however, believe that oil and gas originated in other ways, including chemical reactions...

A team of scientists based at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden have made a "revolutionary" discovery about how hydrocarbon is formed, learning that animal and plant fossils are not necessary to form crude oil.> The article, titled Methane-derived hydrocarbons produced under upper mantle conditions, and published in Nature Geoscience, states that "Whether hydrocarbons can also be produced from abiogenic precursor molecules under the high-pressure, high-temperature conditions characteristic of the upper mantle remains an open question. It has been proposed that hydrocarbons generated in the upper mantle could be transported through deep faults to shallower regions in the Earth’s...

More bad news for the Peak Oil doomsday cult. Russian boffins say they have proved that fossil fuels can be created synthetically by replicating the high pressure, high temperature conditions found in the upper parts of the Earth's crust. The scientists, at the Lomonosov Moscow State Academy of Fine Chemical Technology and the Royal Insitutue of Technology in Stockholm published their work in June. Under conditions of the upper mantle of the Earth's Crust, methane reacts to produce ethane, propane and butane. It means fossils aren't needed to produce oil and gas. While the raw materials to produce synthetic fuels...

Letter abstract There is widespread evidence that petroleum originates from biological processes1, 2, 3. Whether hydrocarbons can also be produced from abiogenic precursor molecules under the high-pressure, high-temperature conditions characteristic of the upper mantle remains an open question. It has been proposed that hydrocarbons generated in the upper mantle could be transported through deep faults to shallower regions in the Earth's crust, and contribute to petroleum reserves4, 5. Here we use in situ Raman spectroscopy in laser-heated diamond anvil cells to monitor the chemical reactivity of methane and ethane under upper-mantle conditions. We show that when methane is exposed to...

The researchers, led by Dr Chris Ballentine from the University of Manchester, concluded that meteorite bombardment, after the moon was first formed, was the only way gases could have arrived so deep within the Earth -- craters on the moon attest to the ferocity of this process... "So we asked the question, `why do volcanoes still spew out gases from so deep, to this day?'" The team sampled volcanic gases in New Mexico. Uniquely, volcanic gases here contain very little air contamination and this allowed the team to measure rare gas isotopes, like neon, for the first time. These isotopes...

Could Deep Source Hydrocarbons Migrate Up Into Oil and Gas Reservoirs? The oil and gas that fuels our homes and cars started out as living organisms that died, were compressed, and heated under heavy layers of sediments in the Earth's crust. Scientists have debated for years whether some of these hydrocarbons could also have been created deeper in the Earth and formed without organic matter. Now for the first time, scientists have found that ethane and heavier hydrocarbons can be synthesized under the pressure-temperature conditions of the upper mantle —the layer of Earth under the crust and on top of...

Nano-research on drill cores from the North Sea might help increase extraction rates of oil in Denmark It is a mystery to many people why the world is running out of oil when most of the world’s oilfields have only been half emptied. However some of the oil that has been located is trapped as droplets of oil in small cavities in the surrounding rock or is stuck to the walls of the underground cavity and cannot be accessed by the techniques currently used in the oil industry. Now, new research may have come up with an explanation as to...

But it may not explain the presence of the gas on the Red Planet today.Traces of serpentine found at Nili Fossae on Mars.NASA/JPL/University of Arizona Surprises keep coming from Nili Fossae, a long, deep scar in the surface of Mars. In December last year, scientists reported evidence there for carbonates — minerals that typically form in the presence of water1. Then, in January, reports came that there was a large plume of methane in the area. On Earth the gas is made mostly by animals as a by-product — although it can also be produced naturally in the absence of...

About half of the oil in the ocean bubbles up naturally from the seafloor, with Earth giving it up freely like it was of no value. Likewise, NASA satellites collect thousands of images and 1.5 terrabytes of data every year, but some of it gets passed over because no one thinks there is a use for it.

ALIEN microbes living just below the Martian soil are responsible for a haze of methane around the Red Planet, Nasa scientists believe.

BBC Audio: Dyson and Clarke Will life spread out from Earth to flourish in the cosmos? Freeman Dyson has always supported the idea, and with great persuasiveness. BBC Four has created an archive of interviews on its Web site, among which is a clip of Dyson discussing life’s variety and the imperative of broadening its range. The theoretical physicist, who played an important role in the development of the ‘atomic spaceship’ concept called Project Orion, doesn’t believe man’s role is simply to send the occasional astronaut out in what he calls ‘a metal can’ to look out a window....

Finding could influence choice of landing site for Mars Science Laboratory. Ithaca, New YorkMore than four years after researchers first said they had found methane gas on Mars, a scientist claims that he has "nailed" the controversial detection and identified key sources of the gas.Nili Fossae is a hotspot for martian methane, says Michael Mumma (below).JPL-Caltech/Univ. Arizona/NASA On Earth, methane is mostly biological in origin; on Mars, it could signal microbes living deep underground. The latest work suggests that martian methane is concentrated in both space and time - at a handful of hotspots hundreds of kilometres across, plumes of...

Sole member of world's first single-species ecosystem depends on rocks and radioactivity for life. The rod-shaped D. audaxviator was recovered from thousands of litres of water collected deep in the Mponeng Mine in South Africa.Greg Wanger, J. Craig Venter Institute / Gordon Southam, University of Western Ontario Nestled kilometres down in the hot, dark vaults of Earth's crust, scientists have discovered a remarkably lonely bacterium species. The rod-shaped bacterium, Candidatus Desulforudis audaxviator, lives independently of any other organism in a part of the Mponeng gold mine near Johannesburg, South Africa, some 2.8 kilometres beneath Earth's surface. There, water flows from...

Desulforudis audaxviator is an organism that lives independently in total darkness and at high temperature by reducing sulfate and fixing carbon and nitrogen from its environment, deep within the Earth. It constitutes the first known single-species ecosystem. Illustration © 2008 Thanya Suwansawad Click here to enlarge image The first ecosystem ever found having only a single biological species has been discovered 2.8 kilometers (1.74 miles) beneath the surface of the earth in the Mponeng gold mine near Johannesburg, South Africa. There the rod-shaped bacterium Desulforudis audaxviator exists in complete isolation, total darkness, a lack of oxygen, and 60-degree-Celsius heat...

Unpicking the route by which microbes produce methane could help to boost the process. Getting usable fuel out of the heavy oil of Canada's tar fields takes a lot of energy.Ian M. Head Researchers have worked out how natural bacteria deep within the Earth break down crude oil and produce methane. This knowledge could help with projects to encourage these bacteria to covert more oil, faster. And it could point towards a way to produce hydrogen - an even cleaner fuel - by using these natural fuel-processing plants.Microbes living on the crude oil in petroleum reservoirs usually start by biodegrading...

An ancient organism from the pit of a collapsed volcano may hold the key to tomorrow's hydrogen economy. Scientists from across the world have formed a team to unlock the process refined by a billions-year old archaea. The U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute will expedite the research by sequencing the hydrogen-producing organism for comparative genomics. When members of the Russian Academy of Sciences isolated a rare archaeal microorganism that breaks down cellulose and produces hydrogen, Biswarup Mukhopadhyay, an assistant professor with the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech, saw an opportunity to open a door for development of...

Some weeks ago, I wrote about microbes in the air and their possible role in helping clouds form, in causing rain and in altering the chemistry of the high atmosphere. This week, I want to go in the opposite direction and plunge down into the earth. For many bacteria live deep in the oceans and deep in the earth, far from light, far from what we normally think of as good, comfortable places to live. For example: the bottom of the Mariana Trench. This is a seam on the sea floor in the northwestern Pacific, not far from the island...

The lost civilization of Atlantis may just be legend, but way down below the ocean (to quote the folksinger Donovan) there are some things that are very real — namely, bacteria and archaea. By some estimates, sub-seafloor prokaryotes may account for two-thirds of the biomass of these types of organisms on Earth. The latest evidence for such a huge undersea biosphere, and a depth record of sorts, is reported in Science by R. John Parkes of Cardiff University and colleagues. They have found living prokaryotes 5,335 feet below the ocean floor off Newfoundland, about twice as deep as the previous...

The dinosaur-killing Chicxulub meteor might have ignited an oilfield rather than forests when it slammed into the Gulf of Mexico 65 million years ago, say geologists. Smoke-related particles found in sediments formed at the time of the impact are strikingly similar to those created by modern high-temperature coal and oil burning, as opposed to forest fires, says Professor Simon Brassell of Indiana University. He and colleagues from Italy and the UK publish their report on the discovery in the May issue of the journal Geology. ...What he and his colleagues have found instead are particles called cenospheres, which resemble the...

Saturn's smoggy moon Titan has hundreds of times more natural gas and other liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, scientists said today....

Saturn's smoggy moon Titan has hundreds of times more natural gas and other liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, scientists said today. The hydrocarbons rain from the sky on the miserable moon, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes. This much was known. But now the stuff has been quantified using observations from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. "Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material — it's a giant factory of organic chemicals," said Ralph Lorenz, a Cassini radar team member from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. "This vast carbon inventory...

Research Finds Life 1000 Feet Beneath Ocean Floor CORVALLIS, Ore. A new study has discovered an abundance of microbial life deep beneath the ocean floor in ancient basalt that forms part of the Earth's crust, in research that once more expands the realm of seemingly hostile or remote environments in which living organisms can apparently thrive. The research was done off the coast of Oregon near a sea-floor spreading center on the Juan de Fuca Ridge, by scientists from Oregon State University and several other institutions. It will be published Friday in the journal Science. In 3.5 million-year-old crust...

Saturn's smoggy moon Titan has hundreds of times more natural gas and other liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, scientists said today. The hydrocarbons rain from the sky on the miserable moon, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes. This much was known. But now the stuff has been quantified using observations from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. "Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material — it's a giant factory of organic chemicals," said Ralph Lorenz, a Cassini radar team member from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. "This vast carbon inventory...

Saturn's orange moon Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, according to new Cassini data. The hydrocarbons rain from the sky, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes. The new findings from the study led by Ralph Lorenz, Cassini radar team member from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, USA, are reported in the 29 January 2008 issue of the Geophysical Research Letters. "Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material--it's a giant factory of organic chemicals," said Lorenz. "This vast carbon inventory is an important...

Marine seismologists have overturned an existing theory about the internal workings of deep-sea hydrothermal vents... Until now, the main hypothesis about hydrothermal vents has been that gigantic pressure forces seawater through large faults along the flanks of the ridge. The water, the theory goes, is then heated by coming into proximity with volcanic rock before re-emerging at the middle of the ridges, where the vents are usually clustered... But in the first detailed investigation into vent circulation, a team led by Maya Tolstoy of Columbia University's Earth Observatory in New York City... placed seismometers over a four-square-kilometre area of the...

Hydrocarbons bubble up from the mid-Atlantic's Lost City. Deep-sea vents could offer a non-biological source of oil and gas.D. KELLEY & M. ELEND, UNIV. WASHINGTON INST. FOR EXPLORATION/URI-IAO/NOAA/THE LOST CITY SCIENCE TEAM Undersea thermal vents can yield unexpected bounty: natural gas and the building blocks of oil products. In a new analysis of Lost City, a hydrothermal field in the mid-Atlantic, researchers have found that these organic molecules are being created through inorganic processes, rather than the more typical decomposition of once-living material. Most of the planet's oil and natural gas deposits were created when decomposing biological matter is 'cooked'...