[xrp]

Why are they digging for dinosaurs down there? They should be digging for oil! There HAS to be hundreds of billions of barrels, considering that Antarctica used to be tropical/sub-tropical and covered with forests.

[null and void]

Why are they digging for dinosaurs down there? They should be digging for oil!

International treaties forbid anyone claiming the oil.

[katana]

There's a theory that hydrocarbons like oil have nothing to do with organic fossils but are seeping up from the Earth's crust. This would explain why we haven't run out of oil in spite of the predictions more than thirty years ago that we would have by the 1990's. For example, old abandoned oil wells for some reason seem to partially refill after being left alone for a decade or two.

I can't remember the name of the scientist who has popularized this theory but to me it makes a lot more sense than the idea that all the oil and coal on the earth are remains of primeval forest and dinosaur crap.

[alrea]

There HAS to be hundreds of billions of barrels, considering that Antarctica used to be tropical/sub-tropical

we must not damage such pristine layers of ice and uninhabitable mud, plus Halliburton would get another contract

[John H K]

There HAS to be hundreds of billions of barrels, considering that Antarctica used to be tropical/sub-tropical and covered with forests.

Coal comes from buried land forests (and there's a LOT of coal on Antarctica.

Oil comes from layers of tiny dead marine algae in a water environment, not land plants (or animals, for that matter, despite all the nonsense you see about oil being "made out of dinosaurs."

[aruanan]

They should be digging for oil! There HAS to be hundreds of billions of barrels, considering that Antarctica used to be tropical/sub-tropical and covered with forests.

Presuming that oil is the product of buried tropical forests, much more likely to be untrue than not based on available evidence.

[RightWhale]

That would give us coal, not oil.