Harry Veeder wrote 11-21-08: Cosmos Online, Monday, 17 November 2008
``Earth's minerals have evolved over time SYDNEY: Geologists have found that Earth's 'mineral kingdom' has co- evolved with life, and that up to two thirds of the more than 4,000 known types of minerals can be directly or indirectly linked to fiological activity ...'' ------------------ Hi All, Has Gaia produced us fire-making animals to stop Earth from plunging into another deep freeze? You may find the follwoing of some interest: Jack Smith --------------- http://naturalscience.com/ns/articles/01-03/ns_folk.html ``Nanobacteria: surely not figments, but what under heaven are they? ROBERT L. FOLK Note 1 Department of Geological Sciences, University of Texas, Austin, Texas 78712, USA Received February 11, 1997, published March 4, 1997 Summary: Nannobacteria are very small living creatures in the 0.05 to 0.2 micrometer range. They are enormously abundant in minerals and rocks, and probably run most of the earth's surface chemistry. Although I conjecture that they form most of the world's biomass, they remain "biota incognita" to the biological world as their genetic relationships, metabolism, and other characteristics remain to be investigated. Introduction Nannobacteria are dwarf forms of bacteria, mostly 0.05 to 0.2 micrometers, about one-tenth the diameter and 1/1000 the volume of ordinary bacteria. The word was first published as "nanobacteria" by Richard Y. Morita in 1988, but I used the spelling "nanno-" to conform with geological usage, e.g., "nannoplankton." ... Discovery The important role of nannobacteria in the mineralogical world was discovered through dumb luck, idle curiosity and random reading. There was no LIFETIME RESEARCH PLAN or THIS CAN GET ME LOTS OF NATIONAL FUNDING idea involved. I was simply looking for a good excuse to continue doing field work in Italy because I loved the food and lifestyle, and hit upon the idea of working on the travertines of Rome (travertine is a whitish type of limestone, usually porous, formed in springs, lakes and streams, and has been used as building stone in Rome for 2000 years). Together with Professor Henry S. Chafetz of the University of Houston, I began work on the Italian travertines in 1979. In the course of this research it was discovered by chance that "normal-sized" bacteria, mainly sulfur-oxidizers, had played a very substantial role in precipitating this stone from the warm springs at Tivoli. Before this discovery neither Chafetz nor myself knew or cared anything about bacteria, as we were specialists in microscopic examination of limestones. In 1988, I returned to Italy to study the hot-spring travertines of Viterbo, about 50 km northwest of Rome. A new electron microscope with magnifications up to 100,000X began to reveal hordes of tiny bumps and balls. At first I passed them off as artifacts of sample preparation or laboratory contamination, as had every other scientist who had studied minerals and rocks with the scanning electron microscope (SEM) ... After a year of doubts, a little reading in Microbiology unearthed the fact that very small cells called "ultramicrobacteria" did in fact exist. With further SEM work, slowly the realization dawned that there really were entombed in minerals enormously abundant cells of this minute size (Figure 1), and in some examples the minerals seemed to be entirely made up of nannobacteria as closely packed as beans in a bag ... Sometimes within a single crystal of mineral, part of the crystal would be crowded with nannobacteria and parts would be deserted, belying the idea of artifacts or "that's the way minerals naturally dissolve." Their occurrence in chains and grape-like clusters further attested to their true living status ... Although DNA analysis of mineralized nannobacteria has yet to be done, some attempt has been made by medical researchers who find "nanobacterial" cells the same size as those I have observed, with cell walls that are very tough and that are resistant to acids, stains and poisons. Because of the tough walls special methods are required to isolate the DNA which occurs as very short strands (O. Kajander, Univ. Kuopio, Finland, personal communication) ... Occurrence At the initial discovery site, the hot springs of Viterbo, Lazio, Italy, some nannobacteria are found in untreated samples along with rare bacteria of normal size (Folk 1993b). However, upon slight etching with HCl, hordes of nannobacteria are revealed entombed in the calcite and aragonite crystals, like peanuts in peanut brittle ... Once they were discovered in the travertines of Viterbo, nannobacteria were soon found in limestones and dolomites (CaMg(CO3)2) in rocks of all ages back to two billion years old (Folk 1993a) ... Silica minerals also show evidence of precipitation by nannobacteria. Such has been observed to be the case with opal, chalcedony, chert and cristobalite (Folk et al. 1995). They are revealed by brief etching with HF. Again, some cherts consist of very closely packed nannobacteria, in other samples they are scanty or even absent ...'' ----------------- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanobacterium ``... Nanobacterium sanguineum was proposed in 1998 as an explanation of certain kinds of pathologic calcification (apatite in kidney stones) by Finnish researcher Olavi Kajander and Turkish researcher Neva Ciftcioglu, working at the University of Kuopio in Finland. According to the researchers the particles self-replicated in microbiological culture, and the researchers further reported having identified DNA in these structures by staining ...'' --------------------- hhtp://www.searchanddiscovery.net/documents/abstracts/2005research_calgary/abstracts/extended/hunt/hunt.htm Hydrides and Anhydrides by C. Warren Hunt, 1119 Sydenham Road SW, CALGARY, ALBERTA, CANADA T2T 0T5, Tel. (403)-244-3341, Fax (403) 244-2834, E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ``Hydrogen being 90% or more of all matter in the Universe, must have been abundantly present in the formation of the early earth. The consensus among scientists has been that most primordial hydrogen was expelled as the earth accreted. New evidence challenges the consensus raises questions as to the validity of other long-held geological concepts. The new evidence involves the behavior of hydrogen nucleii, which at pressures characteristic of mantle depths have shed their electrons and inject themselves inside the first electron rings of metal atoms. Thus sequestered within the earth, hydrogen may comprise as much as 30-40 percent of total earth mass today. Hydrogen penetration into metals was demonstrated by Vladimir N. Larin, a geologist, whose project over the last 34 years has been research in the USSR and FSU on sources of natural hydrogen. Three major effects result from the phenomenon: (1) transmutation, (2) densification, and (3) fluidization ... >From this data it is easily shown that the excess core and mantle density above that of the crust can be attributed to injected hydrogen, and the density differences between inner core, outer core, and lower mantle can be treated as phase effects. In this scenario the idea of an iron core is superfluous ... Carbon ... probably is prominent in the form of carbides in the interior. Its primary hydride form, methane (CH4), although energy-laden like silane, behaves quite differently in three important contrasting ways. First, it does not react with water; second, its combustion products are only gases; and third, it enables the biosphere. Where silane is stalled in the crust by reacting with water, methane and hydrogen released by its partial oxidation proceed upward in fracture pathways. Methane and hydrogen seep into deep, shield mines and through porous members of sedimentary series. Both are major constituents of fluid inclusions in sub-oceanic basalts as well as in shield granites. Their migration is differentially impeded due to their different molecular sizes. Methane may be trapped temporarily, while hydrogen escapes. Both enter the atmosphere worldwide on a large scale. Thus the hydridic earth image comprises a mobile inner geosphere of highly-reduced, dense, intermetals and carbides, an outer geosphere of oxidic rock that has accumulated incrementally through geological time, and a transient liquid-gas envelope. The image implies a core that is neither iron nor very hot, because the heat source for endogeny is primarily not primordial heat but the chemical energy released in the upper mantle and lower crust, near the crust-mantle boundary by hydride oxidation. Hydrocarbons other than methane are partially oxidized carbon forms, and thus unlikely to occur in any form but methane in the earth's interior where extreme reducing conditions prevail. When methane rises to outer crust levels from the interior, its chemical energy is available to metabolize bacteria and archaea that live there in total darkness at elevated temperatures. They get that energy by stripping hydrogen from the methane and oxidizing it metabolically. When bacteria and archaea strip hydrogen from methane, they create 'anhydrides' of methane, CH3, CH2, etc. Two CH3s combine to make C2H6, ethane; two CH3s and one CH2 make C3H8, propane, etc. The process is known on the surface, where outcrops of petroliferous strata sometimes are sealed by bacterially produced tar seals behind which live oil has accumulated. In this case, bacteria have stripped hydrogen from live oil, rendering it immobile. Anhydride theory merely extrapolates the process backward to explain stripping of methane, the lowest carbon numbered hydrocarbon. Petroleum can be interpreted as degenerated methane, a product of the biosphere. Petroleum produced by bacterial stripping of methane is, a mixture of anhydrides of methane, an organic product produced from inorganic methane. Coal and oil shales are also anhydride products. In peat and kerogen-rich shales, partially oxidized carbon is present that has lost electrons and thus carries positive charges. By contrast, the carbon in methane that effuses from the highly reduced earth interior has acquired electrons and is negatively charged. Opposite charges cause capture of effusing methane by peat and kerogen ... The terminal anhydride, pure carbon, the main component of the purest coals and asphaltites, and protein molecules (porphyrins and others) that are found in petroleum and coal are molecular residues of organic origin. The fact that coal and oil shales have more carbon and hydrogen than their peat and fossil predecessors is clear evidence that fossils cannot fully explain their origins. These high carbon and hydrogen contents of oil shales and coals require abiogenic additions, whereas organic molecules require organic provenance. Methane and petroleum found in coal seams and organic shales should be seen as evidence of methane capture, not methane generation. The topology of petroleum occurrence is a further defeat for the argument in favour of either an exclusively organic or exclusively abiogenic origin for petroleum. If oil were either rising from primordial sources in the earth's interior or created in 'oil windows' by catagenesis, the more mobile fractions would escape from the depths and be found more abundantly near the surface and less mobile fractions, low gravity oils, would be present at depth. Exactly the opposite is the norm. Methane gas, the most mobile hydrocarbon, is more abundant with depth, worldwide; and tars, the least mobile, are most abundant at and near the surface ... Working backwards through the above points, we can say that: Topologies of hydrocarbon occurrences indicate that methane effuses from the interior, not petroleum; ... and that the discovery that hydrogen nuclei under pressure penetrate atomic shells of metals, transmuting the metals to intermetals, densifying them, and fluidizing them, creates an entirely new geological picture of the earth's interior, of endogeny, and of the mode by which the crust was created [and also of the almost infinite supply of petroleum and methane waiting to be found.] ''
