danwell at IASTATE.EDU (Daniel A Ashlock) writes:
> As I recall the bubble on the beach hypothisis suffers from an inconvienient
>observation, to wit that the beach was undergoing intense bombardment by
>planitesimals and hence was not a calm enough environment. The deep sea vents
>have more shielding. The guy in experimenting Sweeden with the idea that oil is
>of non-biological origin claims to have found life five kilometers down in the
>crust and is pushing a "life originated and still is mostly miles down" idea.
The researcher is a planetary geologist from Cornell, named Gold. The
original reason for investigating the deep sea vents for micro-organisms
came from his idea that nearly all methane is abiogenic. Much to his
surprise, they found TONS of laughing happy methanogens (archae) living
in the heated sediments and the anoxic 300 C to 4 C water column gradient.
