27 ms·
Does Oil Come from Dinosaurs?
- chrisco255 5y agoOil came mostly from plant matter, buried in the time of dinosaurs and prior and subjected to time and pressure. The biomass of plants exceeds the biomass of animals by as much as two orders of magnitude.
- jonsen 5y ago“But if fossil fuel does not come from dinosaurs, then where does it come from? Plankton.”
- airiers 5y agoPlankton is technically a plant since it does photosynthesis.
- thaumasiotes 5y agoPhytoplankton is plants. Zooplankton is animals. Plankton is anything tiny that drifts in the ocean, not a single miracle species.
- xyproto 5y agoI was hoping for single miracle species.
- osacial 5y agoNo. The main difference between grouping is that phytoplankton receives most of energy by environment(usually Sun) without consuming other plankton and zooplankton does exactly that - it consumes other plankton(both phytoplankton and zooplankton). Phytoplankton does not belong to Plant kingdom and neither do Zooplankton to Animal kingdom. Some Zooplankton are animals, which is subbranch of Eukariota to which most zooplankton belongs. Some of phytoplankton, like cyanobacteria are not considered to belong to plant kingdom, also most of plankton are supergrouped together with plants where most of them are not plants, but also belong to Eukariota. TL;TR: Animals and Plants belong to Eukariota, to which belong all plankton - even if most of them does not belong neither to Plants nor Animals.
- hfsh 5y agoNot even from plants, from plankton.
- airiers 5y agoAnother similar myth is that the air we breathe comes from trees. 2/3 of the air we breath also comes from plankton. Trees are mostly net zero in regards to oxygen. What they release during their lifetime they take back when they die and decay.
- bnegreve 5y agoIf by air you mean (di)oxygen, it kinda does come from the plants, but prehistoric ones rather than modern ones. E.g. see [1] "The growth of these forests removed huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, leading to a surplus of oxygen." [1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/carboniferous https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/carbonife...
- pfdietz 5y agoThe timescale for O2 to be stripped from the atmosphere (by reaction with reduced chemicals exposed by erosion, weathering, and emitted from volcanoes) is only about 10 million years, so the current composition of the atmosphere is due to recent conditions, not ancient conditions. There is an open question of why atmospheric O2 has been relatively stable (varied by a factor of several) in the Phanerozoic. This may just be anthropic selection: if it ever fell too far, higher life would have been wiped out, and we wouldn't be here. This has implications for the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence: it might be that most life-bearing worlds suffocate themselves before ETs can evolve.
- bnegreve 5y agoHum, I'd like to read more about this. I find hard to believe that the current atmospheric conditions are completely unrelated to the rise of oxygen attributed to photosynthesis, and that they can only be explained by anthropic selection (which is always a possible explanation anyway).
- pfdietz 5y agoOxygen has cycled many times through the crust and back out again since the GOE (or even since the Neoproterozoic Oxygenation Event) so I don't see why you think any sort of "memory" of those ancient events would remain in the system.
- dredmorbius 5y agoFor a more complete answer on where oil does come from (spoiler: not dinosaurs --- TFA actually does a nice job of tying that myth to Sinclair Petroleum's advertising mascot), see Jeffrey S. Dukes, "Burning Buried Sunshine" (2003): https://www-legacy.dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_ClimChange1.pdf https://www-legacy.dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_C... (PDF) The beauty of this piece is that it breaks down just how much primordeal biomass goes into producing the oil (and coal and gas) we burn today, and how much ancient time is represented in each present year of consumption. (It's millions.) I've submitted this numerous times to HN with little uptake, most recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27827505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27827505
- lmilcin 5y agoAlso worth to point out Earth needed millions of years to sequester that CO2 we release to atmosphere each year.
- jonsen 5y agoThe atmospheric CO2 is not a that slow sequestering process. It has varied considerably over much shorter time periods than “millions of years”. “Carbon dioxide concentrations have varied widely over the Earth's 4.54 billion year history.”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_atmosphere https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_...
- lmilcin 5y agoI guess you don't understand what "sequestering" means. Sequestering is a process where carbon becomes unavailable for biological processes. So you have carbon circulating (present in biomass, returned to atmosphere, then back to biomass, etc.) and you have carbon that is not available for circulation. Carbon in atmosphere is part of circulation. When a supervolcano erupts and emits a bunch of CO2, this adds carbon to atmosphere but then that carbon may very quickly be bound in biomass (for example algae, forests, etc.) This doesn't mean it is sequestered. The algae can die and ferment and forests can burn, releasing CO2 back to atmosphere. Earth has ability to very quickly bind large amounts of CO2 from atmosphere, true. But it does not have ability to sequester it, because as long as the carbon is present in biomass, that biomass can burn or rot and change to methane/CO2. Current coal, oil and gas deposits are due to the fact that at early stages of evolution there was no bacteria that could process some parts of biomass. For example, plants rather than rot would just be covered with more plants and become coal deposits. Today, it is not possible to form new coal or oil deposits, because any biomass would be quickly digested/fermented/rotted before it could be sequestered.
- pjerem 5y agoOk, I’ll acknowledge for a minute the hard reality that oil doesn’t come from dinosaurs. Then I’ll continue to live my life like I still believe oil comes from dinosaurs.
- sombremesa 5y agoWell, it does come from dinosaurs in a sense, in so far as the word stands for the ancient - which TFA acknowledges. I think saying that oil comes from dinosaurs gets the relevant point across despite being technically incorrect. I'm not sure if there's a better way to communicate the same knowledge in such a succinct way to a child.
- selimthegrim 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echoes_of_Life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echoes_of_Life is highly recommended for another take on the subject.
- HellDunkel 5y agoI have this silly recurring feeling that the extiction of dinosaurs and climate change of today are somehow linked. As if there is an unsolved puzzle which also provides a solution. The gigantic sizes of prehistoric living creatures is the most puzzeling.
- albertgoeswoof 5y agoIs this a commonly held belief? I thought it was just a joke/fake news type of headline…
- Netcob 5y agoI heard this too and somehow just accepted it, even though I could not imagine how this should have happened. So during this major extinction event all the big dinosaurs just gathered in giant groups, fell over, then never really decomposed but got covered with something and turned into coal, oil and gas? Plankton is new to me too though. I thought it was plants, which could not be fully digested by anything at the time, so they just broke down a bit and formed layer after layer, until other organisms caught up and started digesting them completely - so this sort of concentrated organic matter doesn't exist in upper layers.
- dTal 5y agoYou're thinking of coal. There was a 60 million year period between the evolution of lignin (the key ingredient of wood, which allows plants to grow very tall) and the evolution of fungi which could break it down - so dead wood just stacked up, higher and higher. We call that period the Carboniferous, and almost all coal comes from then.
- ceejayoz 5y agoThat may not actually be the case. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4780611/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4780611/ There’s direct fossil evidence of fungal rot during the period, and that much lignin production without corresponding decay would have sucked all the CO2 out of the atmosphere in a few million years.
- osacial 5y agoWell, they did suck most of CO2 out of atmosphere and many times hundred of million years ago: https://earth.org/data_visualization/a-brief-history-of-co2/ https://earth.org/data_visualization/a-brief-history-of-co2/
- ceejayoz 5y agoAt no point on that chart does it go lower than about 200ppm.
- bullen 5y agoOil comes from plants, plankton might eat said algae (phytoplankton would not be sufficient) but trees on land probably contributed as much. The problem obviously is that the process from plant to coal, oil and gas takes a long time so we're inevitably going into a wall of energy deficit that will impact everything. Solar and wind are not solutions as plants are a solar panel and maintenance free battery in one, without any work required. Nuclear (1.000.000.000x higher energy density than batteries) is our only hope/despair to have any chance at preserving this way of life for 8 billion people but it requires hydrocarbons to build and maintain. Reduce your energy consumption as much as possible: no car, small house/appartement. Work on meaningful digital solutions that scale without too much energy. Quit everything else.
- sandworm101 5y agoWith a rising population, on the order of several percent a year, reduced per-person energy consumption cannot do much. It can only delay the inevitable a decade or two. The answers are clean energy or a steadily reduced population. We are biologically adverse to the later, leaving green energy as the only option.
- bullen 5y agoGreen/clean energy does not exist. The only thing that has somewhat +/- zero impact is (edit: small scale) hydro. But hydro also requires hydrocarbons to build and maintain (don't forget the powerlines) and freshwater fish populations are impacted. The population will go down to 1 billion from here, that much is inevitable. The question is how fast it goes down and how much people will suffer: we peaked our growth-rate in 1968: https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth
- sandworm101 5y agoHydro is far from green. Dams flood forest, which no longer absorbs co2 and further rots into methane.
- pfdietz 5y ago
- zyngaro 5y agoThis is the most striking proof that fossil fuels are causing global warming I have ever read: simple energy conservation thermodynamics principal. The fossil fuels store energy from the sun of ancient times. Think of them as batteries with high energy density. Combustion releases that energy in form of carbon that prevents a proportion from the energy coming from the sun from being reflected back into space as infrared waves. Basically it’s like releasing the heat (the energy) from the sun of ancient times and preventing it from escaping into space at the same time. Basically the earth has become a pressure cooker.
- sandworm101 5y agoThere are some regulators at play too. Higher carbon+heat leads to better conditions for plant, which absorbs carbon and generates swamp... Which will be pulled underground to make more oil. We have overwhelmed such systems but they can correct our actions if given time.
- zyngaro 5y agoI am sure the earth will have time to adjust but not « us ». That was my understanding of the phenomenon at play. I may be wrong but it don’t understand the downvote. My comment wasn’t political.
- zyngaro 5y agoAlso higher carbon and heat seem to cause the ice caps and the glaciers to melt down faster than plants can absorb the excess heat. You could also say that it’s a regulator but I’m not sure it’s good the humanity in any way.
- sandworm101 5y agoAnd more and warmer oceans provide more space for plankton to eat carbon. Nature almost always a regulatory process at the ready. The question is only its capacity.
- 5y ago
- aaron695 5y agoCoal does, it has plant fossils and sometimes even animals - https://theconversation.com/coals-formation-is-a-window-on-an-ancient-world-54333 https://theconversation.com/coals-formation-is-a-window-on-a... "A famous site at Nyrany in the Czech Republic was discovered because the director of the natural history museum there had coal delivered to heat his room. Splitting the coal sometimes yielded well-preserved fossils of early amphibians, so he could add scientifically significant specimens to his collections without leaving his office." I'm surprised oil is plankton, not dinosaurs/dinosaur plants as the myth goes.
- nikkinana 5y agoOil comes from the ground. Remember "peak oil" from the 1970's? Google it while you can, before they remove the links.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- vfclists 5y agoI believe some of the outer planets or their moons are made of methane of have loads of methane on them. So if without life there they have so much hydrocarbons, why then do we need to believe that our hydrocarbons come from the remains of some dead creatures, whether plankton or dinosaurs?
- aww_dang 5y agoCui bono? Perhaps there are political motives?
- dredmorbius 5y agoIn the case of coal, we find the fossils of ancient ferns and trees in the coal itself. In the case of oil, the sediments in which deposits are found, the fossils within those deposits, and the chemistry of the oil, all point to biotic rather than abiotic origin. The paper I've linked in my earlier comment has far more detail and further references: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28105383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28105383 Yes, it's possible for hydrocarbons to form by other means. However there's vanishingly little physical evidence to suggest that that is what's actually happened. Retrosplaining terrestrial hydrocarbon deposits based on remote observation, and one short-lived lander on an outer-solar-system moon (the Huygens probe on Titan, with very limited chemical sensig capabilities) in a hand-wavy attempt to invalidate several centuries of direct terrestrial experience with coal, oil, and gas geology is not exceptionally convincing.
- JackFr 5y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin Thomas Gold in the “Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels” explores the idea in depth. It’s not quite a crank theory (I think Gold has a legit academic publication history) but it kind of teeters on the edge. It’s one of those ones I’d like to believe, because it turns much of what we think we know on it’s ear. But a sober look at the evidence makes it seem pretty unlikely.
- AngryData 5y agoI mean those other places also don't have oxygen rich environments though either that consume and destroy hydrocarbons or life forms (that we know of) to catalyze and consume it. If they both existed in the same environment with any abundance they would quickly (geologically) destroy each other until one was nearly depleted. If hydrocarbons on earth weren't buried under tons of rock to keep oxygen and life away it wouldn't exist in meaningful amounts, and much of it got buried in oxygenless enviroments because of life itself. Keep in mind the Earth has had atleast a billion years of time just oxidizing all the elements and chemicals anywhere near or on the surface of the earth or oceans.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- smdz 5y agoFor a long time, I believed this myth - might have heard it on TV as a kid. Then one day while reading about the possibilities of intelligent life on other planets - I wondered how far we (humans) would have got technologically without oil or similar fuels, which "I thought" were a result of dead dinosaurs and a extinction level event. That is when I looked up and found the correct answer.
- aww_dang 5y agoBiologists were surprised to discover giant tube worms living independently of photosynthesis on the deep sea floor. There's much we don't know about the Earth's ecosystems. Particularly of interest will be the possibility of intraterrestrial ecosystems, deep within the Earth. >"The biomass of these intraterrestrial organisms may be equal to the total weight of all marine and terrestrial plants." These observations may not fall in line with the current Malthusian, apocalyptic rationales. The phrase "fossil fuels" seems loaded from this perspective. Our knowledge of the natural world is constantly evolving. Making all-encompassing declarative statements might make sense in some situations, but it also makes sense to question them. https://academic.oup.com/femsle/article/185/1/9/485798 https://academic.oup.com/femsle/article/185/1/9/485798 http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=5412 http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=5412 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riftia_pachyptila https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riftia_pachyptila https://phys.org/news/2019-04-rewriting-textbook-fossil-fuels-technologies.html https://phys.org/news/2019-04-rewriting-textbook-fossil-fuel...
- skrebbel 5y agoThere's a great XKCD "What If" about this. It answers the question "As plastic is made from oil and oil is made from dead dinosaurs, how much actual real dinosaur is there in a plastic dinosaur?" https://what-if.xkcd.com/101/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/101/
- rishikeshs 5y agoWow! I never knew this
- jeandejean 5y agoDefinitely a myth in English speaking countries, that's the first time I read that :-o
- DAD6504 5y agoHow sleep
- pkdpic_y9k 5y agoJust for anyone else scanning for the TLDR reminder of what I probably should have remembered from 8th grade science... Im totally going to take the author's advice and buy my kid some plastic plankton toys :^p > But if fossil fuel does not come from dinosaurs, then where does it come from? Plankton. That’s right. Petroleum does not originate with the Earth’s largest organisms; it begins with its smallest. Most of the biomass in any ecosystem is contained within the bodies of its humblest members, the ones way down near the base of the food chain. In the oceans, that’s phytoplankton, also known as microalgae. These microscopic organisms, mostly diatoms and dinoflagellates, are wondrously able to turn starlight into food. Through photosynthesis, they produce proteins, fats, and carbohydrates — complex carbon-based molecules. Like most tiny organisms, their generations turn over rapidly. When they expire, their minuscule bodies rain down upon the sea floor, where they form organic oozes that may be miles thick. If these biogenic deposits are buried by younger sediments, and cooked by heat and pressure in just the right way, oil and natural gas may form. > Taking the long view, petroleum is really a type of solar energy. That may sound nice, but it’s not innocuous. When we burn it, we take carbon from another age, sequestered by ancient plankton, and dump it into today’s atmosphere. There, it traps heat, causes global warming, and acidifies the oceans. In a sense, we’re adding the power of the ancient Mesozoic Sun to today’s Sun, and it’s overheating our planet. > I’m sure this won’t come as a shock, but don’t believe everything you read on the Internet. Dinosaur toys are not made from dinos, but they are made from dinoflagellates that used starlight from another era to stitch together the carbon-based molecules that today we turn into plastic. A quick search revealed that there are actually plastic plankton toys available online, plastic plankton toys made of — plankton.
- jameshart 5y agoIs this actually a widespread belief held by adults? I think the first time I came across it expressed was in Airplane II - “Well, let's see: First, the Earth cooled. And then the dinosaurs came, but they got too big and fat, so they all died and they turned into oil.” - where, like, the naïveté of the statement is the joke, right? So then when Pixar movies have an oil company called ‘Dinoco’ in them, I’d always assumed that’s as part of that same kind of knowing ‘obviously only a child believes oil comes from dinosaurs’ reference. The idea that oil could be made from dinosaurs is just.. on its face, it’s not plausible, right? It can’t be something people are actually taught. Please.
- pinkmuffinere 5y agoI hadn't given it much thought before, but when I saw the title on hacker news I clicked on it in order to learn what the answer was, haha. I'm generally good at math / physics / engineering, but much worse at chem / bio / wherever-you-learn-about-oil (i guess geology?). All this to say that I bet there are many adults who "believe" it, but maybe they just haven't thought much about oil. I think your message was truly sincere surprise and I didn't find it rude, but it reminds me a bit of this article which I've found very useful in my personal life: https://jvns.ca/blog/2017/04/27/no-feigning-surprise/ https://jvns.ca/blog/2017/04/27/no-feigning-surprise/
- pharrington 5y agoI know I thought oil was decomposed+compressed dinosaur, though I have no idea where that belief came from. Memes are powerful.
- a3n 5y agoI've always thought oil came from dinosaurs, and had no idea about the plankton connection until this article. In other words, I woke up this morning "knowing" that oil came from dinosaurs, and I will go to bed tonight knowing it came from plankton. I'm 63.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ptr2voidStar 5y agoThe older I get (and the more time I spend on HN), the more I realise that the world is a very different place from what I (and the majority of people - it seems), have been led to believe.
- dredmorbius 5y agoLies (told) to children. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children Also Wittgenstein's Ladder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein%27s_ladder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein%27s_ladder
- projektfu 5y agoI always thought the term fossil fuel came from Latin fossa, or ditch, trench. Coal being an exemplar. This probably ended up with its cognate fossil, an item, usually of historical value, dug up from a ditch. Since dinosaurs are represented by fossils, people put the two together.
- simonblack 5y agoOf course it does. When was the last time you heard a squeaky dinosaur?