From: bpayne15@juno.com
Date: Sat Nov 15 2003 - 21:52:08 EST
On Fri, 14 Nov 2003 08:44:32 -0600 "Glenn Morton"
<glennmorton@entouch.net> writes:
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.
OK, I'll bite. What caused the global oceanic circulation to shut down?
I can't imagine any configuration of the continents which would shut off
all circulation. I guess if North America and Europe were joined, that
would cut off the cold polar water from the North Atlantic which would at
least slow circulation in the Atlantic in the northern hemisphere. I
think temperature differences are what drives the circulation?
At any rate, Art suggested that the marine blooms depleted the oceanic
oxygen supply, and also supplied the skeletons to form the chalk deposits
such as we see at Dover, England and the equivalent in south Alabama.
Thus any dead plankton which fell to the 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).
Don't forget, if the OAE was in effect, there may have been shallow,
landlocked seas. Since we know that plankton (or something) DID collect
in the organic-rich shales, then we know that there must have been either
low current flow, or production was high and the currents only spread the
organics over a wide area within the landlocked sea.
Incidentally Glenn, one of your arguments against transported organics
forming coal was that currents would carry the organics out to sea, and
therefore coal must have formed from swamps in situ. Since we know that
plankton are marine and therefore transported before they were deposited,
then by analogy the peat that formed coal could also have been
transported before deposition. The principle is the same.
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.
I saw on some YEC video that oil is forming today in the Gulf of
California. They showed underwater a drop of oil as it escaped from the
bottom and floated up in the water. The message was that oil is not
difficult at all to form under the right conditions. We may not know
what those conditions were, but we do know that oil formed somehow,
regardless of our ignorance as to the process. Understanding the process
isn't important in this context. The question is how do we generate the
organics for the process to convert to oil.
Bill
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