From: Glenn Morton (glennmorton@entouch.net)
Date: Fri Nov 14 2003 - 09:44:32 EST
-----Original Message-----
From: bpayne15@juno.com [mailto:bpayne15@juno.com]
Sent: Thursday, November 13, 2003 9:36 PM
To: glennmorton@entouch.net
Cc: smsmith@usgs.gov; asa@calvin.edu
Subject: Re: Declining water and oil
On Thu, 13 Nov 2003 17:30:32 -0600 "Glenn Morton"
<glennmorton@entouch.net> writes:
> Steve Smith pointed us to an excellent article. I would add that the
> majority of the world's oil is generated by merely 8 unusual times
> in earth history.
> Almost all of the oil
> source rock is generated during continental breakups.
Glenn, could you comment on the article below, posted by Art a few years
back? Do you or Steve see a connection between increased iron in seawater
and the "8 unusual times in earth history?"
GRM: I don't see any connection at all. Producing plankton is easy,
preserving it is the difficult thing. The current idea on the oceanic
anoxic events (OAE) is that the global oceanic circulation shut down,
depriving the deep ocean of oxygen. Thus any dead plankton which fell tothe
bottom was preserved and buried by later plankton which fell on top of them.
The widespread nature of these OAE's can be shown by the fact that the
Eagleford Shale in Texas, an organic rich shale, is the very same shale as
the Plenus Marl in Great Britain, and the source rocks which generated most
of the oil in the Gulf of Mexico, is Oxfordian and Kimmeridgian in age, the
same as the source for the oils offshore Nova Scotia and the oil in the
NOrth Sea.
Art's suggestion is great for creating organic matter, but one then has to
collect it, cook it and turn it into oil and that is much more difficult
(especially the collecting part since currents carry it away). His
suggestion doesn't really have anything to do with actually creating oil
which is more than CH2, which is Methylene and is not a stable product. My
suspicion is that the energy used to separate out the .
methylene would be more than its energy content.
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