[HN Gopher] Does Oil Come from Dinosaurs?
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Does Oil Come from Dinosaurs?
Author : azizsaya
Score : 154 points
Date : 2021-08-08 08:19 UTC (14 hours ago)
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| projektfu wrote:
| I always thought the term fossil fuel came from Latin fossa, or
| ditch, trench. Coal being an exemplar.
|
| This probably ended up with its cognate fossil, an item, usually
| of historical value, dug up from a ditch. Since dinosaurs are
| represented by fossils, people put the two together.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Oil came mostly from plant matter, buried in the time of
| dinosaurs and prior and subjected to time and pressure. The
| biomass of plants exceeds the biomass of animals by as much as
| two orders of magnitude.
| jonsen wrote:
| "But if fossil fuel does not come from dinosaurs, then where
| does it come from? Plankton."
| airiers wrote:
| Plankton is technically a plant since it does photosynthesis.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Phytoplankton is plants. Zooplankton is animals. Plankton
| is anything tiny that drifts in the ocean, not a single
| miracle species.
| osacial wrote:
| No. The main difference between grouping is that
| phytoplankton receives most of energy by
| environment(usually Sun) without consuming other plankton
| and zooplankton does exactly that - it consumes other
| plankton(both phytoplankton and zooplankton).
|
| Phytoplankton does not belong to Plant kingdom and
| neither do Zooplankton to Animal kingdom. Some
| Zooplankton are animals, which is subbranch of Eukariota
| to which most zooplankton belongs. Some of phytoplankton,
| like cyanobacteria are not considered to belong to plant
| kingdom, also most of plankton are supergrouped together
| with plants where most of them are not plants, but also
| belong to Eukariota. TL;TR: Animals and Plants belong to
| Eukariota, to which belong all plankton - even if most of
| them does not belong neither to Plants nor Animals.
| xyproto wrote:
| I was hoping for single miracle species.
| hfsh wrote:
| Not even from plants, from _plankton_.
| zyngaro wrote:
| This is the most striking proof that fossil fuels are causing
| global warming I have ever read: simple energy conservation
| thermodynamics principal. The fossil fuels store energy from the
| sun of ancient times. Think of them as batteries with high energy
| density. Combustion releases that energy in form of carbon that
| prevents a proportion from the energy coming from the sun from
| being reflected back into space as infrared waves. Basically it's
| like releasing the heat (the energy) from the sun of ancient
| times and preventing it from escaping into space at the same
| time. Basically the earth has become a pressure cooker.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| There are some regulators at play too. Higher carbon+heat leads
| to better conditions for plant, which absorbs carbon and
| generates swamp... Which will be pulled underground to make
| more oil. We have overwhelmed such systems but they can correct
| our actions if given time.
| zyngaro wrote:
| I am sure the earth will have time to adjust but not << us
| >>. That was my understanding of the phenomenon at play. I
| may be wrong but it don't understand the downvote. My comment
| wasn't political.
| zyngaro wrote:
| Also higher carbon and heat seem to cause the ice caps and
| the glaciers to melt down faster than plants can absorb the
| excess heat. You could also say that it's a regulator but I'm
| not sure it's good the humanity in any way.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| And more and warmer oceans provide more space for plankton
| to eat carbon. Nature almost always a regulatory process at
| the ready. The question is only its capacity.
| zyngaro wrote:
| Sure life will adapt or change or not. But I am not sure
| we will. We have now reached the point where we can stop
| using fossil fuels and dumping carbon into the
| atmosphere.
| maxerickson wrote:
| The direct heat contribution from combustion is minuscule.
| albertgoeswoof wrote:
| That's not evidence of global warming, you'd have to prove the
| energy released is large enough and not radiated away / stored
| back in some other way.
|
| Unfortunately global warming is real and there's plenty of
| evidence for it. Your mechanism isn't really the issue though,
| it's the greenhouse gases trapping new energy from the sun
| which is the basic root cause.
| zyngaro wrote:
| Exactly what I was saying. Some of the those greenhouse gases
| is coming from fossil fuel combustion.
| el_nahual wrote:
| Even though GP's mechanism doesn't explain global warming, it
| _does_ explain the nigh-impossibility of developing
| technology that can carbon-capture us out of this mess.
|
| Biomass is basically solar-powered carbon sequestration.
|
| If each year of fossil fuel consumption corresponds to the
| energy of 400 years of biomass, and we've been burning "too
| many" fossil fuels for 50 years, then to get out of this mess
| we would have to cover 50x400 = 20,000 Earth's with solar
| panels hooked up to carbon capture machines.
|
| It's way worse, if course, because photosynthesis is more
| efficient than solar panels, and there's inefficiencies in
| carbon capture, but you get the idea!
|
| We've used up way, way, WAY too much energy making tiny
| explosions and now we have to undo each and every one of
| them.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| Your example incorrectly assumes the entire solar constant
| went toward carbon sequestration and this is obviously not
| the case.
|
| The overall energy efficiency of the natural photosynthesis
| to sequestered carbon process is not inherently more
| efficient than man-made alternatives. The efficiency of the
| PV cell is just one small factor.
|
| A much more accurate way to calculate sequestration
| potentials is to measure their energy cost and multiply by
| available energy.
| el_nahual wrote:
| It's just a Fermi estimate. Feel free to multiply/divide
| by ten (or even 100!) in either direction. The main point
| is that we're not going to carbon capture our way out of
| this--at least not with anything resembling modern
| technology.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| But your estimate is demonstrably off by at _least_ a
| factor of ten thousand.
|
| The thrust of this paper is that it takes 90 tons of
| ancient biomass to result in 1 gallon of gasoline. This
| is a reduction of 30,000 to 1. This is the _opposite_ of
| an efficient system. The vast majority of solar input and
| related carbon captured from the atmosphere by ancient
| plant matter is not being utilized by modern fossil fuel
| systems.
|
| The point of this paper is that the ancient
| photosynthesis to fossil fuels process is incredibly
| inefficient. The "400 years" isn't indicative of the
| energy we're consuming today -- it's indicative of the
| extremely low percentage of solar energy that ends up
| captured inside fossil fuels.
|
| We absolutely can carbon capture our way out of this.
| Again, you can do some pretty basic math on known
| sequestration techniques to disprove your conclusion.
| philipswood wrote:
| I'd put my money on directly modulating incoming solar
| radiation instead
|
| From the first time I saw the animations of the planned
| Starlink fleet, I started wondering if one could use a
| satelite fleet to manage incoming solar radiation.
|
| I've commented about it a few times before.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18474244
| dTal wrote:
| It is interesting to consider just how much excess energy it
| would take to _directly_ upset Earth 's thermal balance. In
| 3001: The Final Odyssey, Arthur C Clarke predicted a thermal
| crisis caused by abundant free energy. Is it plausible?
|
| Total solar insolation is in the region of 1.8x10^17 W, which
| is some 10,000 times greater than the total energy use of
| humanity. This is not so far out when you consider our
| exponential energy use over the past few centuries! If growth
| does not slow (which it must), we could expect to use that
| much energy in about 4 more centuries.
|
| But we could expect to hit problems before then. What
| percentage of disruption to Earth's energy budget leads to
| visible effect? Our current imbalance due to greenhouse gases
| amounts to roughly 1 Watt per square meter, or 0.1%. At our
| current rate of growth we'll reach that in a mere century! So
| even if we switch entirely over to nuclear power starting
| today, and continue along our merry way safe in the knowledge
| that we're producing no greenhouse gases, in 100 years we'll
| have a similar warming problem from _energy alone_.
| mdale wrote:
| True .. but if we could just shoot excessive heat off into
| space no? Like a few city scale central heating / cooling
| systems that radiated into space.
| dTal wrote:
| Unfortunately not. All waste heat is already radiated
| into space, and there's no way to make it go faster. Heat
| always flows from hot places to cold places, unless you
| put energy in - so we can't gather all of our waste heat
| into one place for disposal, without creating more waste
| heat. It's the second law of thermodynamics, I'm afraid.
| eloff wrote:
| Isaac Arthur on YouTube talks about this quite a bit.
|
| Given limitless cheap energy like nuclear fusion, the
| ultimate limit on human population is not land or water but
| the waste heat that we generate. We're very far from that
| being an issue today, but in some dystopian future where we
| turn earth into Coruscant, that could be a thing.
|
| I hope instead we stabilize our population or move to
| settlements in orbit. I'd like to see the land we currently
| use for food to be rewilded in a world where we can grow
| food in orbit and in vertical farms / artificial food
| factories. It would be nice if future humans mostly lived
| in cities or space habitats and the earth mostly went back
| to nature.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| You might be interested in the book "ethnobotany: people,
| plants, and culture" to learn why leaving nature alone is
| not the best option, that biodiversity and rich
| ecosystems can come from human interference - weeding
| plants that are taking over, spreading seeds of food and
| medicine, intentionally building the soil - after a few
| thousand years you end up with the Amazon rain forest. It
| doesn't happen on its own, humans are a part of it. To
| have this mind of leaving earth alone and even leaving it
| behind is leaving a lot of good food on the table, I
| wouldn't want to live among the factory farms in space.
| dTal wrote:
| I don't buy that the Amazon is meaningfully a consequence
| of human activity. The sheer biodiversity on display is
| not something I can imagine evolving in just a few
| thousand years.
| eloff wrote:
| The Amazon is much older than humans in South America. I
| don't buy this theory either.
| dTal wrote:
| I don't know if 100 years is "very far". It's not
| implausible that someone develops a practical fusion
| plant this decade, and at that point we're well on our
| way. We don't even need to turn the planet into Coruscant
| - by the maths I just spelled out, we're only a factor of
| 10 away from noticeable warming! A bit more population
| growth, a few lifestyle upgrades for the global south,
| and we're there.
| AngryData wrote:
| Im skeptical that fusion will be a silver bullet for our
| problems. While I agree that producing lots of clean
| energy is the solution we need for many things, im not
| sure fusion is going to scale very easy when it is
| becomes practical for power generation. The sun is only
| producing thermal power per volume equivalent to a pile
| of manure, so even if we manage to increase that an order
| of magnitude, we will need an astronomical amount of
| plants and infrastructure to make it a primary energy
| source. And with such scales needed, we could have
| already done the same thing using other sources including
| fission.
| eloff wrote:
| Yes, that's closer than I thought.
|
| We may well need to deploy configurable sunshade at the
| earth - sun Lagrange point or something similarly drastic
| to keep the climate in a hospitable band.
| aaron695 wrote:
| Coal does, it has plant fossils and sometimes even animals -
|
| https://theconversation.com/coals-formation-is-a-window-on-a...
|
| "A famous site at Nyrany in the Czech Republic was discovered
| because the director of the natural history museum there had coal
| delivered to heat his room. Splitting the coal sometimes yielded
| well-preserved fossils of early amphibians, so he could add
| scientifically significant specimens to his collections without
| leaving his office."
|
| I'm surprised oil is plankton, not dinosaurs/dinosaur plants as
| the myth goes.
| pjerem wrote:
| Ok, I'll acknowledge for a minute the hard reality that oil
| doesn't come from dinosaurs.
|
| Then I'll continue to live my life like I still believe oil comes
| from dinosaurs.
| nikkinana wrote:
| Oil comes from the ground. Remember "peak oil" from the 1970's?
| Google it while you can, before they remove the links.
| ptr2voidStar wrote:
| The older I get (and the more time I spend on HN), the more I
| realise that the world is a very different place from what I (and
| the majority of people - it seems), have been led to believe.
| airiers wrote:
| Another similar myth is that the air we breathe comes from trees.
|
| 2/3 of the air we breath also comes from plankton.
|
| Trees are mostly net zero in regards to oxygen. What they release
| during their lifetime they take back when they die and decay.
| bnegreve wrote:
| If by air you mean (di)oxygen, it kinda does come from the
| plants, but prehistoric ones rather than modern ones.
|
| E.g. see [1] " _The growth of these forests removed huge
| amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, leading to a
| surplus of oxygen._ "
|
| [1]
| https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/carbonife...
| pfdietz wrote:
| The timescale for O2 to be stripped from the atmosphere (by
| reaction with reduced chemicals exposed by erosion,
| weathering, and emitted from volcanoes) is only about 10
| million years, so the current composition of the atmosphere
| is due to recent conditions, not ancient conditions.
|
| There is an open question of why atmospheric O2 has been
| relatively stable (varied by a factor of several) in the
| Phanerozoic. This may just be anthropic selection: if it ever
| fell too far, higher life would have been wiped out, and we
| wouldn't be here. This has implications for the existence of
| extraterrestrial intelligence: it might be that most life-
| bearing worlds suffocate themselves before ETs can evolve.
| bnegreve wrote:
| Hum, I'd like to read more about this. I find hard to
| believe that the current atmospheric conditions are
| completely unrelated to the rise of oxygen attributed to
| photosynthesis, and that they can only be explained by
| anthropic selection (which is always a possible explanation
| anyway).
| pfdietz wrote:
| Oxygen has cycled many times through the crust and back
| out again since the GOE (or even since the Neoproterozoic
| Oxygenation Event) so I don't see why you think any sort
| of "memory" of those ancient events would remain in the
| system.
| bnegreve wrote:
| Ok, I'm not saying that the exact same molecules of O2
| from the GOE were preserved until today, rather that the
| presence of O2 in the atmosphere is related to the
| emergence of plants and photosynthesis. This is what I
| meant by "O2 comes from prehistoric plants".
|
| For the record, the "memory" if you want to call it like
| this, would be the (unoxidized) carbon buried underground
| and/or segregated in the plants body.
| pfdietz wrote:
| There is unoxidized carbon buried underground, but the
| bulk of the Earth has vastly more reducing capacity than
| relatively piddling amounts of buried organic carbon.
| Fully oxidized, the Earth could consume orders of
| magnitude more oxygen than exists in the atmosphere.
| Simply oxidizing all the minerals in the crust down to a
| couple of hundred meters would use all the atmosphere's
| O2, and then there's thousands of kilometers of mantle
| loaded with ferrous iron and sulfides, and then the iron
| core.
| bnegreve wrote:
| I see, it's actually a bit scary. But if oxidation of
| atmospheric O2 doesn't happen fast enough (no matter why)
| the O2 surplus can still be explained somewhat indirectly
| by the emergence of photosynthesis billions years ago. Or
| maybe by something else. Anyway, I finally got your
| point, interesting.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The atmosphere is like a leaky boat. Oxygen leaks out
| when rocks are eroded and weathered and when volcanoes
| release reduced gases, and burial of photosynthesized
| material pumps it back in. The troubling part is that
| there's no obvious reason why these two processes have to
| be balanced over periods much longer than the time
| constant of the system.
| tomtomtom777 wrote:
| I think it's a bit odd to call this "net zero".
|
| If there are more trees, there's more oxygen.
|
| Sure, if a tree dies this is eventually reverted but it also
| makes room for a new tree (unless humanity claims the land).
| TheFreim wrote:
| All of these myths I learned in school make me think it was an
| even bigger waste of time than I originally though.
| rabuse wrote:
| Our public education in the U.S. is a travesty. There's
| really no incentive to remain up-to-date on information, and
| it seems to be getting worse.
| mncharity wrote:
| An educator suggests[1], in the context of preK science
| education, that students have a _human right_ to make sense
| of their world "now". That's very not the focus of current
| science education content. PreK-13. But what if were? What
| might that look like?
|
| Status quo is students being told the Sun is yellow, from
| preK on through to the most common intro astronomy college
| textbooks, with only a few of them getting an "oops, nope,
| our bad" decades later, in astronomy graduate school
| discussion of common misconceptions in astronomy education.
| We've known Sun color for a century, had detailed limb
| darkening and tint numbers for decades, and now years of
| intensive effort on stellar atmospheres in support of
| occultation and exoplanet work. Also years of
| hemispherical-camera daytime-sky surveys. And science
| education content manages to remain decoupled from all of
| that.
|
| A startup pivoted from supporting learning of English in
| Japan, because the market there turned out to be for
| performance on English proficiency exams, not for English
| fluency. And a teacher remarked that it seemed the societal
| objective was English accessibility for work, while
| avoiding the fluency which could contaminate culture.
| Similarly, an truly excellent briefing on biology would
| necessarily be pervasively steeped in evolution... and thus
| be less than entirely welcome in the US. Not that Europe or
| Russia, or China, India, or Brasil, have incentivized its
| creation either. It seems neither the science research nor
| science education communities are set up to pursue it.
|
| [1]
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Larimore+Vision+2020
| ptr2voidStar wrote:
| This is precisely my thoughts, as I scroll through the
| comments - jaw on the floor.
| ptr2voidStar wrote:
| Has anyone bothered to point this out to tree huggers out
| there?
|
| Some citations on this would be very powerful antidote to the
| misinformation out there.
|
| I'm speechless
| jameshart wrote:
| Is this actually a widespread belief held by adults? I think the
| first time I came across it expressed was in Airplane II - "Well,
| let's see: First, the Earth cooled. And then the dinosaurs came,
| but they got too big and fat, so they all died and they turned
| into oil." - where, like, the naivete of the statement is the
| joke, right?
|
| So then when Pixar movies have an oil company called 'Dinoco' in
| them, I'd always assumed that's as part of that same kind of
| knowing 'obviously only a child believes oil comes from
| dinosaurs' reference.
|
| The idea that oil could be made from dinosaurs is just.. on its
| face, it's not plausible, right? It can't be something people are
| actually taught. Please.
| pharrington wrote:
| I know I thought oil was decomposed+compressed dinosaur, though
| I have no idea where that belief came from. Memes are powerful.
| a3n wrote:
| I've always thought oil came from dinosaurs, and had no idea
| about the plankton connection until this article.
|
| In other words, I woke up this morning "knowing" that oil
| came from dinosaurs, and I will go to bed tonight knowing it
| came from plankton.
|
| I'm 63.
| mark-r wrote:
| If you ever come to doubt the power of advertising, just
| remember Sinclair.
| Razengan wrote:
| Best computer ever.
| [deleted]
| jrace wrote:
| I think it is less about the myth being taught, and more about
| the truth not being taught.
|
| I know I assumed Fossil Fuel = meant the fuel came from
| fossils, and the first thing that comes to mind when I hear
| "fossils" is dinosaurs.
|
| I just never thought to look further than that.
| seoaeu wrote:
| I mean, even the simplified answer of coal coming from
| ancient plant matter and oil from ancient animal matter
| doesn't do much to dispel the myth.
| jameshart wrote:
| I wonder if this is it - kids making logical inferences to
| connect ideas in school, and not being given quite enough
| information to realize there's a gap there. And then they
| think that that's 'what they were taught', even if no teacher
| or textbook ever actually joined those dots up.
|
| Similarly, I think a lot of people think dinosaur fossils are
| all dinosaurs who died when they went extinct, because if
| fossils are dead dinosaurs, and dinosaurs are famous for
| dying out, those must be connected, right?
|
| Whereas of course dinosaurs had actually been dying (and
| starting on their way to being fossils) for millions of years
| before the extinction event which... actually _stopped_ them
| from dying any more.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| I hadn't given it much thought before, but when I saw the title
| on hacker news I clicked on it in order to learn what the
| answer was, haha. I'm generally good at math / physics /
| engineering, but much worse at chem / bio / wherever-you-learn-
| about-oil (i guess geology?). All this to say that I bet there
| are many adults who "believe" it, but maybe they just haven't
| thought much about oil.
|
| I think your message was truly sincere surprise and I didn't
| find it rude, but it reminds me a bit of this article which
| I've found very useful in my personal life:
| https://jvns.ca/blog/2017/04/27/no-feigning-surprise/
| globular-toast wrote:
| I'm wondering the same thing. I find it incredible that anyone
| thinks this, but I've never actually asked an adult (or child
| for that matter) where they think oil comes from. I might ask
| the girlfriend tomorrow.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Sinclair oil has a dinosaur logo.
| jameshart wrote:
| Is Sinclair oil a famous brand? Where I grew up there was a
| lot of Shell oil petrol stations but I never got the
| impression oil came from crustaceans.
| [deleted]
| jeandejean wrote:
| Definitely a myth in English speaking countries, that's the first
| time I read that :-o
| rishikeshs wrote:
| Wow! I never knew this
| vfclists wrote:
| I believe some of the outer planets or their moons are made of
| methane of have loads of methane on them.
|
| So if without life there they have so much hydrocarbons, why then
| do we need to believe that our hydrocarbons come from the remains
| of some dead creatures, whether plankton or dinosaurs?
| AngryData wrote:
| I mean those other places also don't have oxygen rich
| environments though either that consume and destroy
| hydrocarbons or life forms (that we know of) to catalyze and
| consume it. If they both existed in the same environment with
| any abundance they would quickly (geologically) destroy each
| other until one was nearly depleted. If hydrocarbons on earth
| weren't buried under tons of rock to keep oxygen and life away
| it wouldn't exist in meaningful amounts, and much of it got
| buried in oxygenless enviroments because of life itself. Keep
| in mind the Earth has had atleast a billion years of time just
| oxidizing all the elements and chemicals anywhere near or on
| the surface of the earth or oceans.
| JackFr wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin
|
| Thomas Gold in the "Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil
| Fuels" explores the idea in depth.
|
| It's not _quite_ a crank theory (I think Gold has a legit
| academic publication history) but it kind of teeters on the
| edge. It's one of those ones I'd like to believe, because it
| turns much of what we think we know on it's ear. But a sober
| look at the evidence makes it seem pretty unlikely.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| In the case of coal, we find the fossils of ancient ferns and
| trees in the coal itself.
|
| In the case of oil, the sediments in which deposits are found,
| the fossils within those deposits, and the chemistry of the
| oil, all point to biotic rather than abiotic origin.
|
| The paper I've linked in my earlier comment has far more detail
| and further references:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28105383
|
| Yes, it's _possible_ for hydrocarbons to form by other means.
| However there 's vanishingly little physical evidence to
| suggest that that is what's actually happened.
|
| Retrosplaining terrestrial hydrocarbon deposits based on remote
| observation, and one short-lived lander on an outer-solar-
| system moon (the Huygens probe on Titan, with very limited
| chemical sensig capabilities) in a hand-wavy attempt to
| invalidate several centuries of direct terrestrial experience
| with coal, oil, and gas geology is not exceptionally
| convincing.
| aww_dang wrote:
| Cui bono? Perhaps there are political motives?
| [deleted]
| HellDunkel wrote:
| I have this silly recurring feeling that the extiction of
| dinosaurs and climate change of today are somehow linked. As if
| there is an unsolved puzzle which also provides a solution. The
| gigantic sizes of prehistoric living creatures is the most
| puzzeling.
| pkdpic_y9k wrote:
| Just for anyone else scanning for the TLDR reminder of what I
| probably should have remembered from 8th grade science... Im
| totally going to take the author's advice and buy my kid some
| plastic plankton toys :^p
|
| > But if fossil fuel does not come from dinosaurs, then where
| does it come from? Plankton. That's right. Petroleum does not
| originate with the Earth's largest organisms; it begins with its
| smallest. Most of the biomass in any ecosystem is contained
| within the bodies of its humblest members, the ones way down near
| the base of the food chain. In the oceans, that's phytoplankton,
| also known as microalgae. These microscopic organisms, mostly
| diatoms and dinoflagellates, are wondrously able to turn
| starlight into food. Through photosynthesis, they produce
| proteins, fats, and carbohydrates -- complex carbon-based
| molecules. Like most tiny organisms, their generations turn over
| rapidly. When they expire, their minuscule bodies rain down upon
| the sea floor, where they form organic oozes that may be miles
| thick. If these biogenic deposits are buried by younger
| sediments, and cooked by heat and pressure in just the right way,
| oil and natural gas may form.
|
| > Taking the long view, petroleum is really a type of solar
| energy. That may sound nice, but it's not innocuous. When we burn
| it, we take carbon from another age, sequestered by ancient
| plankton, and dump it into today's atmosphere. There, it traps
| heat, causes global warming, and acidifies the oceans. In a
| sense, we're adding the power of the ancient Mesozoic Sun to
| today's Sun, and it's overheating our planet.
|
| > I'm sure this won't come as a shock, but don't believe
| everything you read on the Internet. Dinosaur toys are not made
| from dinos, but they are made from dinoflagellates that used
| starlight from another era to stitch together the carbon-based
| molecules that today we turn into plastic. A quick search
| revealed that there are actually plastic plankton toys available
| online, plastic plankton toys made of -- plankton.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| For a more complete answer on where oil _does_ come from
| (spoiler: not dinosaurs --- TFA actually does a nice job of tying
| that myth to Sinclair Petroleum 's advertising mascot), see
| Jeffrey S. Dukes, "Burning Buried Sunshine" (2003): https://www-
| legacy.dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_C... (PDF)
|
| The beauty of this piece is that it breaks down _just how much_
| primordeal biomass goes into producing the oil (and coal and gas)
| we burn today, and how much ancient time is represented in each
| present year of consumption. (It 's millions.)
|
| I've submitted this numerous times to HN with little uptake, most
| recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27827505
| zzzeek wrote:
| it needs to be turned into a flashy webpage with lots of JS
| animation. pretty tough to get lots of traffic on a pdf file.
| irrational wrote:
| I'm on a phone and I simply can't read it.
| lmilcin wrote:
| Also worth to point out Earth needed millions of years to
| sequester that CO2 we release to atmosphere each year.
| jonsen wrote:
| The atmospheric CO2 is not a that slow sequestering process.
| It has varied considerably over much shorter time periods
| than "millions of years".
|
| "Carbon dioxide concentrations have varied widely over the
| Earth's 4.54 billion year history.":
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_.
| ..
| lmilcin wrote:
| I guess you don't understand what "sequestering" means.
|
| Sequestering is a process where carbon becomes unavailable
| for biological processes.
|
| So you have carbon circulating (present in biomass,
| returned to atmosphere, then back to biomass, etc.) and you
| have carbon that is not available for circulation.
|
| Carbon in atmosphere is part of circulation. When a
| supervolcano erupts and emits a bunch of CO2, this adds
| carbon to atmosphere but then that carbon may very quickly
| be bound in biomass (for example algae, forests, etc.) This
| doesn't mean it is sequestered. The algae can die and
| ferment and forests can burn, releasing CO2 back to
| atmosphere.
|
| Earth has ability to very quickly _bind_ large amounts of
| CO2 from atmosphere, true.
|
| But it does not have ability to sequester it, because as
| long as the carbon is present in biomass, that biomass can
| burn or rot and change to methane/CO2.
|
| Current coal, oil and gas deposits are due to the fact that
| at early stages of evolution there was no bacteria that
| could process some parts of biomass. For example, plants
| rather than rot would just be covered with more plants and
| become coal deposits.
|
| Today, it is not possible to form new coal or oil deposits,
| because any biomass would be quickly
| digested/fermented/rotted before it could be sequestered.
| FooHentai wrote:
| The pre-bacteria theory is pretty shaky fyi. There is
| evidence for relevant biomass-degrading bacteria being
| ubiquitous at the times of coal/oil formation. A more
| plausible theory imo is that geological conditions in the
| paleozoec/mesozoeic era lent themselves to greater fossil
| fuel formation - greater tectonic activity alone would
| produce the flooding and interment processes necessary to
| push significant volumes of biomass down to fuel the
| process.
| lmilcin wrote:
| For a significant mass of biomass to be pushed down it
| first needs to be present.
|
| Have you ever been in a coal mine?
|
| Coal deposits can be very thick and can consist of
| practically pure coal with very little anything else.
|
| Our densest forests if suddenly "pushed" (I guess covered
| by ash or anything else, without loosing carbon) would be
| millimeters in width.
| yxhuvud wrote:
| So why can't peat deposits turn into coal under the right
| conditions? Those form all the time under certain
| conditions, but they can sequester a fair amount of
| biomass.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The values from Dukes's paper are illuminating.
|
| - The fossil fuels _burned_ in a year represent about 400
| years ' worth of accumulated ancient biomass. That is, you'd
| need to capture _all_ the biomass grown _for four centuries_
| to give the fuel we consume in one year.
|
| - But conversion and preservation aren't perfect. So it took
| _five million_ years to form just the oil we consume annually
| (or did in 1997, though values have remained reasonably
| constant since). That is, only about 0.008% of ancient
| biomass was stored as petroleum.
|
| I don't know the figures for carbon-cycle sequester and
| release rates, though at best we're looking at centuries to
| remove what we've put into the atmosphere in decades, if not
| longer.
| pfdietz wrote:
| CO2 is mostly sequestered by reaction to form carbonates,
| not by reduction to biomass, but yes it will take a long
| time. In the intermediate it will dissolve into the deep
| ocean (mostly), but even that takes a while.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| By chemical / geological processes, or as organic
| limestone (mostly shellfish / plankton skeleton)
| deposits?
| pfdietz wrote:
| Both? The calcium to make the limestone has to come from
| somewhere.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| This reaction can also be accelerated by crushing basalts
| and other readily-available rocks to a fine sand/dust,
| and exposing that to the open air by spreading it over
| large areas of ground, such as fields or beaches. The
| process is not cheaper than other kinds of carbon
| sequestration, but it's definitely comparable and long-
| term sequestration of the carbon seems especially likely,
| since we're simply enhancing the existing geological
| carbon cycle.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Peridotites, in particular, with lots of olivine. Olivine
| weathers particularly quickly because its silicon atoms
| are in SiO4(4-) tetrahedra that are not covalently linked
| to each other (a "nesosilicate").
|
| A problem with just spreading this out on beaches and the
| like is that these rocks are also often enriched in
| nickel vs. the average crustal rock, and this would
| release many millions of tonnes of nickel into the
| environment. There is some evidence that nickel release
| was part of the terrible events at the Permian-Triassic
| extinction. Nickel is crucial to the enzymes in the
| metabolic pathways leading to the production of methane
| in anaerobic environments. There's an idea that nickel
| injection into the oceans by fallout from the PT
| megaeruption in Siberia led to massive methane
| production.
| lmilcin wrote:
| I would also point out that today it is not possible to
| form new large scale coal/oil deposits.
|
| Coal/oil deposits that we are using up now formed because
| at the time there was no bacteria that could digest dead
| plant/plankton matter.
|
| This is also why all coal/oil deposits are very old. There
| is very little deposits after bacteria has evolved.
|
| Nowadays there needs to be special circumstances for a
| piece of biological matter to not be digested by bacteria.
| For example it would have to be covered by permafrost or
| drown in oxygen-deficient lake for a very, very long time
| and then covered by soil.
| kfprt wrote:
| This was the most interesting thing I learned when
| studying geology. More people should know about it.
| Qwertious wrote:
| It's a controversial claim and _probably_ false,
| definitely don 't repeat it unless you've personally
| verified with an expert.
| lmilcin wrote:
| Nevertheless, there are no coal or oil deposits being
| formed or freshly formed (in geological terms).
|
| This roughly suggests to me, for whatever reason, there
| is no longer circumstances for new deposits to form.
| yxhuvud wrote:
| It can also mean we are looking in the wrong places.
| [deleted]
| bradrn wrote:
| I've heard this several times, but I looked into it in
| more detail, and it seems that there's some controversy:
| e.g. https://www.pnas.org/content/113/9/2442, https://aca
| demic.oup.com/femsre/article/41/6/941/4569254?log...
| taberiand wrote:
| So at least once we send ourselves extinct through
| fossil-fuel driven climate change, any intelligent life
| that comes after us won't have the resources to do the
| same.
| irrational wrote:
| Is it possible for intelligent alien life to arise on a
| world without any oil/gas/coal reserves (maybe they don't
| have the equivalent of plankton, or maybe they do, but
| bacteria that could eat the plankton evolved much
| earlier)? If so, would they be forever trapped on their
| planet, never able to go through an Industrial Age and
| eventually achieve rocket flight? Maybe this is one
| explanation for why no aliens, so far.
| b3morales wrote:
| Without the easy energy source to bootstrap their tech,
| they may not get anywhere near having to consider that
| problem. They might not even make it to figuring out
| steel.
| lmilcin wrote:
| Interesting thought.
|
| I think energy is least of problems. At the beginning
| forests provide a lot of energy and would be enough to
| bridge to industrial times (at least for us).
|
| The real issue, I think, is lack of easily available raw
| materials like iron, tin, copper, etc. We have depended A
| LOT on iron practically lying on the ground.
|
| Without having _some_ iron easily available any startup
| civilization wouldn 't know to look deeper and even if
| they wanted, they would not have any tools to do so.
|
| At least with energy there is multiple ways to acquire
| it.
| rtkwe wrote:
| On the other hand there's a lot of already processed and
| extracted iron and steel we've conveniently dug up and
| left around for future societies to maybe harvest.
| lmilcin wrote:
| You are right, I haven't thought of it.
| rtkwe wrote:
| I think it still works out to a net difficulty increase
| to any group trying to restart an industrialized
| civilization because of how much easy energy reserves
| have been permanently extracted. There's basically no
| surface level coal/oil/gas that could be tapped into and
| finding the remaining reserves from scratch might be
| prohibitively difficult.
|
| Then there's the question of how much of the steel will
| still be usable when it's time to extract it. That's a
| variable problem depending on how long the 'dark age' is
| before people are rebuilding I suppose. It could be like
| Doctorow's Walkaway where there's abundant enough
| discarded resources you can almost achieve post-scarcity
| (but that world never wen through a hard crash it was
| more building a parallel society than a whole new one).
| Or it could be centuries later when a lot of the steel
| will be rust. Hard to say.
| creddit wrote:
| Also worth to point out Earthly life existed for millions of
| years with that CO2 unsequestered ;)
| manachar wrote:
| Is it really worth pointing this out? Why?
|
| This is (mostly) a non-sequitur to any modern discussion
| about climate, the atmosphere, and its effects on human
| life and civilization.
|
| Life, at this point is used to a particular equilibrium.
| Sure, life has existed at different equilibriums. But we
| also know when those equilibriums are massively disturbed
| (via a great oxygenation event, massive asteroid, major
| volcanic eruptions, etc.) much of the life dies out
| (obviously depends on the intensity of the disruption) and
| it takes many years for life to adjust to and make a new
| equilibrium.
|
| Humanity should be deeply concerned with how deeply we have
| disrupted the equilibrium, as this disrupts the world and
| biosphere that sustains us.
|
| It might be useful if you're building an argument that
| humanity will be better off after the current mass
| extinction event is over. However, I tend to find this
| point more often leads to a George Carlin-esque cynicism
| and nihilism about earth being better off without humans
| (or human civilization) anyways.
| [deleted]
| smdz wrote:
| For a long time, I believed this myth - might have heard it on TV
| as a kid. Then one day while reading about the possibilities of
| intelligent life on other planets - I wondered how far we
| (humans) would have got technologically without oil or similar
| fuels, which "I thought" were a result of dead dinosaurs and a
| extinction level event. That is when I looked up and found the
| correct answer.
| aww_dang wrote:
| Biologists were surprised to discover giant tube worms living
| independently of photosynthesis on the deep sea floor. There's
| much we don't know about the Earth's ecosystems. Particularly of
| interest will be the possibility of intraterrestrial ecosystems,
| deep within the Earth.
|
| >"The biomass of these intraterrestrial organisms may be equal to
| the total weight of all marine and terrestrial plants."
|
| These observations may not fall in line with the current
| Malthusian, apocalyptic rationales. The phrase "fossil fuels"
| seems loaded from this perspective. Our knowledge of the natural
| world is constantly evolving. Making all-encompassing declarative
| statements might make sense in some situations, but it also makes
| sense to question them.
|
| https://academic.oup.com/femsle/article/185/1/9/485798
|
| http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=5412
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riftia_pachyptila
|
| https://phys.org/news/2019-04-rewriting-textbook-fossil-fuel...
| albertgoeswoof wrote:
| Is this a commonly held belief? I thought it was just a joke/fake
| news type of headline...
| skrebbel wrote:
| There's a great XKCD "What If" about this. It answers the
| question "As plastic is made from oil and oil is made from dead
| dinosaurs, how much actual real dinosaur is there in a plastic
| dinosaur?"
|
| https://what-if.xkcd.com/101/
| Netcob wrote:
| I heard this too and somehow just accepted it, even though I
| could not imagine how this should have happened. So during this
| major extinction event all the big dinosaurs just gathered in
| giant groups, fell over, then never really decomposed but got
| covered with something and turned into coal, oil and gas?
|
| Plankton is new to me too though. I thought it was plants, which
| could not be fully digested by anything at the time, so they just
| broke down a bit and formed layer after layer, until other
| organisms caught up and started digesting them completely - so
| this sort of concentrated organic matter doesn't exist in upper
| layers.
| dTal wrote:
| You're thinking of coal. There was a 60 million year period
| between the evolution of lignin (the key ingredient of wood,
| which allows plants to grow very tall) and the evolution of
| fungi which could break it down - so dead wood just stacked up,
| higher and higher. We call that period the Carboniferous, and
| almost all coal comes from then.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| That may not actually be the case.
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4780611/
|
| There's direct fossil evidence of fungal rot during the
| period, and that much lignin production without corresponding
| decay would have sucked all the CO2 out of the atmosphere in
| a few million years.
| osacial wrote:
| Well, they did suck most of CO2 out of atmosphere and many
| times hundred of million years ago:
| https://earth.org/data_visualization/a-brief-history-of-
| co2/
| ceejayoz wrote:
| At no point on that chart does it go lower than about
| 200ppm.
| osacial wrote:
| Well, look again - some of the group of points reach
| right to 200ppm.
|
| Equation of line has nothing to do with reaching 200ppm,
| as that is average - adapted to whole timeline. Would
| look completely different in a different scope.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Despite feedbacks with weathering rates, much smaller
| imbalances would have resulted in the complete removal of
| atmospheric CO2 in less than a million years. Without
| evidence of such dire consequences, lignin production in
| the absence of lignin decay for more than 100 million
| years into the early Permian is untenable.
|
| The study addresses CO2 levels closely, as well as other
| significant pieces of evidence. I would tend to assume
| the peer reviewers at one of the world's most prestigious
| journals thought to Google up historical CO2 levels.
| bullen wrote:
| Oil comes from plants, plankton might eat said algae
| (phytoplankton would not be sufficient) but trees on land
| probably contributed as much. The problem obviously is that the
| process from plant to coal, oil and gas takes a long time so
| we're inevitably going into a wall of energy deficit that will
| impact everything.
|
| Solar and wind are not solutions as plants are a solar panel and
| maintenance free battery in one, without any work required.
|
| Nuclear (1.000.000.000x higher energy density than batteries) is
| our only hope/despair to have any chance at preserving this way
| of life for 8 billion people but it requires hydrocarbons to
| build and maintain.
|
| Reduce your energy consumption as much as possible: no car, small
| house/appartement.
|
| Work on meaningful digital solutions that scale without too much
| energy.
|
| Quit everything else.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| With a rising population, on the order of several percent a
| year, reduced per-person energy consumption cannot do much. It
| can only delay the inevitable a decade or two. The answers are
| clean energy or a steadily reduced population. We are
| biologically adverse to the later, leaving green energy as the
| only option.
| bullen wrote:
| Green/clean energy does not exist. The only thing that has
| somewhat +/- zero impact is (edit: small scale) hydro. But
| hydro also requires hydrocarbons to build and maintain (don't
| forget the powerlines) and freshwater fish populations are
| impacted.
|
| The population will go down to 1 billion from here, that much
| is inevitable. The question is how fast it goes down and how
| much people will suffer: we peaked our growth-rate in 1968:
| https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Hydro is far from green. Dams flood forest, which no longer
| absorbs co2 and further rots into methane.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Solar and wind likely are the solution. They are cheaper than
| nuclear and are improving much faster. Nuclear faces great
| obstacles to reaching a level that could power civilization
| (for example, breeding would likely be required, and breeder
| reactors have proven to be even more expensive than today's
| thermal burner reactors; breeders are also excellent sources of
| super-weapon grade fissionable material.)
|
| The energy density argument for nuclear goes nowhere. It's not
| something any consumer cares about, nor is energy density a
| showstopper for renewables (except biomass, so don't base the
| renewable energy system on biomass).
| simonblack wrote:
| Of course it does. When was the last time you heard a squeaky
| dinosaur?
| selimthegrim wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echoes_of_Life is highly
| recommended for another take on the subject.
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