A Theory As Good As Gold

By Natalie Angier

Like the White Queen in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, Cornell University Astronomer Thomas Gold has forged a distinguished career by believing six impossible things before breakfast. In the late 1940s, he, Astronomer Fred Hoyle and Mathematician Hermann Bondi roiled the cosmological community when they countered an early version of the big-bang theory of the universe with their steady state model, which stipulated the continual creation of matter (a concept now completely out of favor). In 1968 Gold was the first to propose that pulsars were rapidly rotating neutron stars (all evidence suggests he was right). In the mid-1960s he sparked another ruckus by predicting that the first spacecraft to land on the moon could encounter a mile-thick layer of dust that, if loose, would engulf the vehicle (the lunar surface, of course, was perfectly firm).

Since then, the Cornell professor has been vigorously promoting an equally unorthodox theory about the origin of oil and gas. Nearly all geologists believe that petroleum is the product of ancient decayed organisms. Gold insists that natural gas is an inorganic component of the earth's mantle, as much as 200 miles below ground, and is continually thrust toward the surface by geological and mechanical forces. "When choosing a hypothesis," he says, "there's no virtue in being timid."

Gold has won some important converts to his brazen idea. The Swedish government, with support from the U.S. Gas Research Institute, is expected to invest $14 million to bore 15,000 ft. into the granite bedrock of Lake Siljan in central Sweden, in the hope of finding vast stores of natural gas. Reason: the lake was formed when a meteor slammed to the earth 360 million years ago, possibly fracturing the bedrock and allowing gas to percolate upward. Says William Staats, director of basic research at the Gas Research Institute in Chicago: "We believe that there is enough at stake to warrant our exploration."

Oil and gas are members of a vast chemical family known as hydrocarbons, compounds composed of hydrogen and carbon entwined in complex and varying arrays. As it turns out, living creatures contain considerable stores of both elements. Putting two and two together, geologists have long assumed that when living organisms die, heat, light and bacteria begin to degrade the constituent compounds. That organic material then collects in sedimentary layers in the sea and is buried progressively deeper. After millions of years, pressure and temperature convert the debris into fossil fuels. Yet little hard evidence supports this conventional wisdom. Declares Tore Lindbo, Swedish Power Board coordinator of the Lake Siljan project: "It is simply a theory that is generally accepted."

As an astronomer, Gold approached the puzzle with a fresh perspective. He knew that carbon is the fourth most abundant element in the solar system, appearing in planets, asteroids, meteors and comets, often in the form of hydrocarbons. Gold believes that when the primordial gaseous swirl condensed into the sun and its satellites, large amounts of hydrocarbons settled in the earth's interior. Some of those compounds seeped upward into porous rocks and sediments, says Gold, and became such accessible pockets of riches as the oil fields of the Arabian Peninsula. He predicts that if greater depths were mined, fuel reserves far beyond current estimates would be found.

Many geologists remain skeptical of Gold's theory. Says one official of a major oil corporation: "You'd have trouble convincing my company to put money into a project like this." They may regret doubting Thomas: six test bores 1,500 ft. to 2,000 ft. deep have been drilled into the Siljan area, and though Sweden is not thought to sit atop typical petroleum sediments, all six have shown traces of hydrocarbons.

With reporting by David Bjerklie/New York, with other bureaus