Excerpt from my book The Truth About Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change: Exposing Climate Lies in an Age of Disinformation
Thomas Gold, a brilliant scientist, was born in Vienna on May 22, 1920. His father, Max Gold, was a doctor of law who served as CEO of ÖMAG, a large industrial mining and metal corporation. In the 1930s, Max Gold moved the family to Berlin to become CEO of another large company in the same industry. In 1933, when Hitler assumed power as Germany’s chancellor, Max Gold, a Jew, decided to flee Germany to return to Austria. Thomas Gold spent his early years in Switzerland, attending the Lyceum Alpinum Zuoz boarding school near St. Moritz. When he graduated at age seventeen, he joined his family, who had fled back to Austria by then.
On March 12, 1938, at the Anschluss, Germany invaded Austria and annexed it into Nazi Germany. Gold and his family went to the U.K. with stateless papers. In September 1939, when war was declared, the British government, fearing invasion by Hitler’s Nazi Germany, rounded up hundreds of other Germans and Austrians who were technically enemy aliens. Gold had entered Trinity College in 1939, where he began studying mechanical sciences. But when the internment began, the British government picked up Gold and shipped him to Canada with some 800 others.
Fifteen months later, when the U.K. released most of these detainees, Gold returned to the U.K., and in 1942 he resumed his studies at Cambridge University, switching from mechanical sciences to physics. Gold left Cambridge in 1952 to serve as the chief assistant to Astronomer Royal at the Royal Greenwich Observatory in Sussex, England. In 1956, he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to serve as professor of astronomy at Harvard University. In early 1959, Cornell hired Gold away from Harvard, offering him a professorship in the Department of Astronomy, with an assignment to set up an interdisciplinary unit for radiophysics and space research. Gold chaired the astronomy department and directed the Center for Radiophysics and Space Research, where he hired many prominent astronomers, including Carl Sagan. But he had to wait until 1969 to get his doctorate when Cambridge University finally decided to bestow upon him an honorary degree. Gold was a Fellow of the Royal Society in London and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.1
Gold has a long list of scientific achievements to his credit. In April 1942, Gold joined the British naval research establishment to become a member of the radar establishment at the Admiralty. He worked with the theory group headed by two scientists, Fred Hoyle and Hermann Bondi, also famous. There, Gold directed the development of new radar devices, which played a significant role in defending the U.K. against Nazi air attacks. In 1946, when he was a graduate student in astrophysics at Cambridge University, he was intrigued with a problem that had stumped auditory physiologists for years. How did the human ear manage to distinguish so finely the subtleties of musical notes? The conventional scientific wisdom then was a nineteenth-century idea first proposed by the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz. The accepted theory was that the inner ear functioned as a series of “strings” vibrating at different frequencies. The conventional wisdom held that the ear was the rough instrument that took in the noise. The brain was the vital organ of hearing, distinguishing between the tones to identify individual notes and combinations. Gold disagreed. His work on radar convinced him that the ear as a detecting instrument had to function more finely, truly adding something to distinguish the sounds. He believed the ear amplified incoming noise by adding energy to the detected frequencies before the ear transmitted the signals to the brain. Not until the 1970s did physiologists finally conclude that the inner ear contained a series of fine hairs that did act as amplifiers, exactly as Gold had suggested years before.
Then, in 1955, Gold suggested, contrary to conventional wisdom, that a fine rock powder covered the moon’s surface. Again, he was vindicated, but not until Apollo 11 touched down on the moon in 1969 and the world watched as Neil Armstrong hopped around, kicking up a fine-grain powder of rock as he moved along. Gold was one of the 110 scientists worldwide who received moon soil samples from the Apollo 11 mission to test. In 1967 Gold advanced the theory of pulsars by suggesting that pulsars are neutron stars that spin out radio waves as they rotate. Traditional astronomers ridiculed the idea until astronomers discovered a pulsar in the Crab Nebula, a neutron star that spun out radio waves as it revolved.
Gold’s thinking about oil began with his primary academic discipline, astronomy. As an astronomer versed in spectroscopy to determine the chemical composition of stars and planets, Gold understood that hydrocarbons are abundant in the universe. Since the early part of the twentieth century, spectrographs that analyzed wavelengths have permitted astronomers to determine with certainty that carbon is the fourth most abundant element in the universe, right after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen. Furthermore, among planetary bodies, “carbon is found mostly in compounds with hydrogen—hydrocarbons—which, at different temperatures and pressures, may be gaseous, liquid, or solid. Astronomical techniques have thus produced clear and indisputable evidence that hydrocarbons are major constituents of bodies great and small within our solar system (and beyond).”2 In other words, Gold understood that hydrocarbons are not organic chemicals resulting from life processes on Earth, as proponents of the fossil fuel theory commonly assume. Instead, hydrogen and carbon are elements readily available in the universe, elements that combine with carbon to form hydrocarbons, whether life is present or not.
The Deep, Hot Biosphere
In his second book published twelve years later, in 1999, entitled The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels,3 Gold advanced his thoughts on abiogenic deep-Earth methane vents. What fascinated Gold was the abundant life scientists had begun discovering at great ocean depths with no sunlight. He puzzled at how this life at great ocean depths could survive without sunlight. He became fascinated that life at these ocean depths were huddled around deep-sea vents that were exuding menthane, and he came up with the concept of a “deep, hot biosphere.” He explained the following:
In these ocean vents, a borderland between the surface and the deep biospheres, there may be some atmospheric oxygen available that was carried down in solution in the cold ocean water. If this were sufficient for converting all the methane supplied from the vents into carbon dioxide and water, then this borderland province would be dependent on surface biological processes, and it would not be an outpost of what I suggest is an independent realm of life stretching down into the rocks below. It seems doubtful that the prolific life at these concentrated locations on the ocean floor could receive enough waterborne atmospheric oxygen, but a firm answer is not yet known. However, this issue is not of central importance. We now know of many cases where we can probe so far down into the deep biosphere that atmospheric oxygen has absolutely no access, and we observe generally similar metabolic processes taking place there. Where does the necessary oxygen come from?4
Around these ocean vents, marine scientists discovered many living creatures, from simple organisms (such as bacteria) to more advanced microorganisms (such as tubeworms). How could these macrofauna live in seawater so deep no light could penetrate that far? He realized that the microbes were living off the food base of the deep-sea methane vents, and more advanced macrofauna survived by feeding on the microbes. Gold explained this phenomenon as follows:
Two decades of studies have revealed that these microbes feed on molecules gushing from the vents: hydrogen (H2), hydrogen sulfide (H2S), and methane (CH4), each of which can supply energy only if oxygen is available. No known animal can feed on any of these chemicals directly, but animals can feed on microbes that do. What is particularly remarkable about the deep-ocean vent communities is that many of the macrofauna seem to be dependent on symbiotic partnerships with the microbes.5
From there, Gold came to another startling conclusion. The presence of methane in the output of deep-ocean vents assumed primary importance because the methane could be the source of the carbon required for the microbes to live and the source of chemical energy. He explained his realization as follows:
Hydrocarbons bear a structural resemblance to foods we eat that are derived from photosynthesizers. For example, the only material difference between a molecule of hexane (a six-carbon form of petroleum) and a molecule of glucose (a six-carbon sugar, common in foods at the surface) is that hydrogen atoms surround the chain of carbon in hexane, whereas water molecules surround the chain of carbon in sugar. The hexane C6H14 is a hydrocarbon, whereas the sugar C6H12O6 is a carbohydrate. The terminological difference is subtle but important. For us animals, the carbohydrate is a food, the hydrocarbon poison. Nevertheless, the biological idiosyncrasies of our own tribe of complex life should not be allowed to constrain our judgment as to the possibilities—indeed preferences—among the multi-talented microbes. They might well have a metabolism that requires an input of petroleum.6
Gold contemplated that the deep-ocean microbes feeding on deep-Earth methane were the beginning of life on Earth. This perception helps explain why 80 percent of Earth’s history, the entirety of Precambrian time, was needed to develop life on Earth. Complex structures like trilobites, a now-extinct form of marine arthropods, only emerged in the Early Cambrian period some 521 million years ago. Gold proposed that the source of energy for life on Earth was not photosynthesis. Instead, he suggested that the degassing of hydrocarbons in deep-sea hydrothermal vents was crucial to life-forming Earth.7 Gold realized the carbon cycle on Earth began with deep-Earth hydrocarbons. He rejected the conventional notion “that hydrocarbons present within the earth’s upper crust are derived strictly from plant and animal debris transformed by geological processes,” insisting instead that hydrocarbons exuding from these deep-sea hydrothermal vents played a critical role in the origin of life on Earth by feeding the microorganisms that live there.8
Equally startling, Gold’s contemplation of the deep, hot biosphere led him to an essential perception that atmospheric CO2 was a by-product of Earth’s carbon cycle, not a central feature. Gold was fascinated by ocean methane hydrate structures. Ocean methane hydrates are white, ice-like solids in which microscopic cages composed of water molecules trap methane molecules.9 Methane hydrate structures also exist under the Arctic permafrost. Gold puzzled why more ocean hydrates were not made up of CO2 if CO2 was such a central part of Earth’s carbon cycle. He analyzed the following:
Hydrates made up of CO2 rather than methane can exist also, though over a smaller range of temperature and pressure than methane hydrates. Nevertheless, there are substantial areas of ocean floor that could support CO2 hydrates, but few—if any—such samples have been found.10
He noted that often “there is more carbon in the methane atoms trapped in a deposit of hydrate than in all the sediments associated with that deposit.” He explained his reasoning:
In such instances the conventional explanation of its [carbon’s] source (biological materials buried within the sediments) cannot account for the production of so much methane. The methane embedded in the ice lattices must have risen from below, through innumerable cracks in the bedrock. Once a thin, capping layer of the solid forms, the genesis of more such hydrate underneath becomes an inevitability, provided methane continues to upwell.11
He observed the conclusion that the source of methane in ocean hydrate lies beneath, not within, the sedimentary layers of Earth, was strengthened by evidence of pockets of free methane gas beneath some regions of hydrate ice and also beneath permafrost layers of Arctic tundra. He noted that in ocean methane hydrate, downward migration of methane gas from overlying sediments did not seem conceivable. “Gases, after all, do not migrate downward in a liquid of greater density,” he wrote. “If there is any flow, it is in the reverse direction.”12 His study of ocean methane hydrates reinforced his conclusion that deep-sea methane vents were fundamental to producing life on Earth and how the carbon cycle on Earth operates. He further concluded “that ‘gentle’ but widespread addition of carbon to the atmosphere is a global phenomenon of diffusion from the ground of methane and other hydrocarbons, no doubt at different rates at different locations and at different times.”13 He combined this with his understanding of the chemical composition of meteorites to conclude that “hydrocarbons and not CO2-producing compounds will have been the principal input of carbon in the forming earth.”14
There is a long list of tributes to Thomas Gold, including those listed here. (1) Cornell news release, “Thomas Gold, Astronomer and Brilliant Scientific Gadfly, Dies at 84,” June 22, 2004. (2) “Thomas Gold (1920–2004),”Bulletin of the AAS [American Astronomical Society], Volume 36, Issue 4 (December 1, 2004), https://baas.aas.org/pub/thomas-gold-1920-2004/release/1. (3) “The Art of Genius: Thomas Gold: Lived 1920-2004,” FamousScientists.org, no date. (4) Hermann Bondi, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, “Thomas Gold. 22 May 1920–22 June 2004,” The Royal Society Publishing, December 1, 2006, . (5) Geoffrey Burbidge and Margaret Burbidge, “Thomas Gold 1920-2004,” National Academy of Sciences, Biographical Memoirs, Volume 88 (2006). (6) Daniel R. Colman, Saroj Poudel, et al., “The deep, hot biosphere: Twenty-five years of retrospection,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Volume 114, Number 27 (July 3, 2017), pp. 6895-6903, . See also for a discussion of his life and a long list of his most important publications: “Thomas Gold,” Wikipedia.org, last edited on September 22, 2021.
Thomas Gold, The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels (New York: Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., 1999), p. 44.
Thomas Gold, The Deep Hot Biosphere.
Ibid., p. 17.
Ibid., p. 19.
Ibid., p. 22. Emphasis in original.
Ibid., p. 5.
Ibid. Emphasis in original.
“Methane hydrates,” WorldOceanReview.com, no date.
Thomas Gold, The Deep Hot Biosphere, p. 26.
Ibid. Parentheses in original.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 27.
Ibid.