OIL AS GEOLOGICAL INVERSION-LAYER TURNOVER?

With luck, Man has not become a geologically slow evil genius manipulating mineral resources in the Earth to make the planet shine like a star.

High density saline lakes which develop high buoyancy deep layers due to inflowing fresh water streams are vulnerable to the development of invert stratification. That is where the natural order of depth on the basis of density is violated because the influx of fresh water occurs quietly in smooth laminar flow. Something similar to this happens when Carbon Dioxide escapes into deep waters but dissolves quickly due to pressure at that depth. The result is a deep cold layer of carbonated water, just like carbonated beverage only vast in size. The heavy upper layers of fluid flow rapidly downward, and that triggers even more active effervescence in a positive feed-back cycle that can become almost explosive.

Lakes of that kind have suddenly bubbled over in the past, sometimes resulting in many fatalities when people and animals living in the vicinity are asphyxiated by the sudden flow of the gas, which contains no available oxygen and displaces breathable air.

In geology, something similar can happen when light mineral layers deep in the Earth underlie heavy mineral layers. The largest such layering is likely to be cases where relatively light silicate rock is overlain by extensive iron ore deposits, or where subducted carbon deposits such as coal or oil are overlain by heavier rock of any kind - silicate or iron.

The present Gulf oil pollution leak resembles a small breakthrough in a potential re-inversion pattern in which oil, much lighter than rock, flows upward through a fissure or oil pipe. For every cubic meter of oil that leaks up to the water, a square kilometer of ocean floor settles one micron deeper into the Earth. No other way it can go, the situation is even worse, because the settling destabilizes the rock structure and tends to cause more leaks. With its vast weight, that rock really wants to go down.

If that kind of thing is happening in the Gulf, it will likely occur with increasing frequency in the future. Good statistics and honesty in reporting the sizes and times of leaks will be vital in order to assess whether this is a pattern that is actually taking place. It must be compared with another kind of "leak" - that in which human beings, through the development of powerful machinery, became able to mine vast quantities of limestone and iron ores with which to construct extensive highways and architectural works all over the world. This was just about the same time the Moon as dredged out of the barycenter of the Earth and conceptually put back in the sky where it always was anyway. Much iron and limestone literally came out of the Earth's crust with the Moon, and the limestone and iron were a kind of re-inversion activity in which Man played a part.

The point is that nature will always press for events to take place in ways that conduct the Earth to more stable forms - even if, as with Mars, they are less inhabitable. To be sure these are very long range questions, but a few centuries ago nobody would have thought it possible to draw millions of tons of minerals to the surface, either.

Human beings must avoid creating highly ordered paths by which the world's natural forces can flow more quickly toward events destructive to life. Some of these are subtle. The Dark Skies association reports that the flow of energy from nuclear reactors to night-time light pollution above cities resembles the radiation from a star too well. There is a vector of flow of power directly from the transformation of mass into energy, through the heat, steam, turbines, generators, electric transmission lines, and street lights into the empty cold vast admittance of outer space. Literally, through the agency of mankind's low entropy, ever clever, high-order paths and reasoned order, the Earth is beginning to radiate like a star.

For comparison, consider the white dwarf star orbiting Sirius-it is smaller than the Earth. The only thing we have not found are stars smaller than the Earth which are less massive than the Earth. Then we'll know.

After all, the Pyramids were geologically macroscopic objects.