Exploring Deep Earth and Deep Space: What Role Does the Petroleum Industry Play?

Abstract

Hydrocarbons Exciting hydrocarbon discoveries of mind-bending quantities are being made in the far reaches of our solar system and our own Milky Way galaxy. A new paper (http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-010) by scientists on NASA’s Cassini-Huygens mission finds that blocks of hydrocarbon ice might float upon the surface of existing lakes and seas of liquid methane and ethane on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. Findings from a recent study (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1210.8178v1) of the Horsehead Nebula, part of the Orion Constellation, propose the discovery of a new interstellar molecule, the cation C3H+ (propynylidyne). C3H+ was one of 30 molecules identified in the region, including several small hydrocarbons. Titan is about a billion miles away from Earth (1.5 light-hours) and the Horsehead Nebula is 1,300 light-years away (7.6 quadrillion miles). Why should the petroleum industry pay attention to the existence of hydrocarbons at impracticable distances from Earth? Perhaps instead it would make more sense to focus on deep Earth. However, there is a sense in which attempting to look below the surface of our own planet is a far more difficult task than exploring outer space: We can send a human 238,900 miles away to the surface of our moon, and humans routinely spend months on-board the International Space Station, which is maintained at an orbital altitude of between 205 and 255 miles above Earth. But only three humans have been to the Challenger Deep, first sounded during the HMS Challenger expedition (December 1872 to May 1876) at the southern end of the 1,580-mile-long, crescent-shaped Mariana Trench some 210 miles southwest of Guam, which at 36,069±131 ft (a little less than 7 miles) below sea level is the deepest point in Earth’s oceans. Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh spent only 20 minutes at a depth of 35,814 ft on 20 January 1960, in the bathyscaphe Trieste. Filmmaker James Cameron spent a little over 3 hours there on 25 March 2012, in his specialized sub-marine called the Deepsea Challenger. A few deep-sea remotely operated vehicles have also plumbed the depths of the Challenger Deep. Of course, for humans to actually enter the Earth’s crust is impossible without clearing and bolstering a mine-shaft. The deepest humans have ever traveled into the Earth is at the Tau-Tona gold mine, near Carletonville, South Africa, which extends some 2.4 miles underground.