GOLD, T. 1999. The Deep Hot Biosphere. xiv + 235 pp. Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, Barcelona, Budapest, Hong Kong, London, Milan, Paris, Singapore, Tokyo: Copernicus (Springer-Verlag). Price DM 49.00, Ös 358.00, SFr 45.50, £19.00, US $27.00 (hard covers). ISBN 3 540 98546 8.

Abstract

Some publicans are wise enough to post a notice behind the bar that bans discussion of religion or politics on the premises. Adding Thomas Gold’s deep-Earth gas notion, the central thread running through The Deep Hot Biosphere , to the list would be a wise move for Earth scientists. That is, if adherents to his world-view were thick on the ground. A proselytiser leaps unchained from the text and, if his readers’ comments on amazon.com are anything to go by, Gold is winning support among the laity as the architect of a ‘paradigm shift’. The Deep Hot Biosphere ranks around 6000 on the list of all electronic book sales, although I learned to my amusement that many of his readers also bought the latest in J. K. Rowling’s ‘Harry Potter’ series! Gold implicitly lays a trap for the unwary reviewer, by likening the general annoyance generated by his views to that directed at Alfred Wegener 80 years ago. He seems to seek the mantle of modern Earth science’s misunderstood hero, indeed its Moses. Thomas Gold’s notion that petroleum and even coal owe their origin to methane upwelling from a mantle reservoir is familiar to most Earth scientists. In The Deep Hot Biosphere Gold welds this view to the discovery in recent years of ever deeper occurrences of living thermophilic bacteria in boreholes. He builds a case not only for the deep biota’s catalysing the deposition of petroleum and coals from primordial methane, but that they represent relics of life’s origins in deep, crystalline, basement rocks, and that, even today, they outweigh the surface biomass. His is something of a minority outlook. Gold writes well, persuasively and very successfully, as the standing of The Deep Hot Biosphere in the science best-seller list shows. Two or more decades ago Erich von Daniken …