Friday, March 26, 2010

Crustal fragmentation -Rifting - Huge Oil Deposits in India

In Herndon’s view, virtually all major geological activity is the consequence of a single process: Earth-crust fragmentation – splitting the Earth’s crust to form new surface area to accommodate decompression-increased planetary volume.
Crustal fragmentation, called rifting, provides all of the crucial components for petroleum-deposit formation: basin, reservoir, source, and seal. Rifting causes the formation of deep basins, as presently occurring in the Afar triangle of Northeastern Africa. Augmented by heat channeled upwards from deep within the Earth, uplift from sub-surface swelling can sequester sea-flooded lands to form halite evaporate deposits, lead to dome formation, and can make elevated land susceptible to erosion processes, thus providing sedimentary material for reservoir rock in-filling of basins. Moreover, crustal fragmentation potentially exposes deep basins to sources of abiotic mantle methane and, although still controversial, methane-derived hydrocarbons.

Drawing upon an understanding he developed with respect to the East African Rift System and the underlying rifting and extensive petroleum and natural gas deposits associated with the Siberian


Traps, Herndon predicts the extensively rifted region beneath the Deccan Traps of India will become the site of important energy-resource discoveries. In fact, the first discovery has already been reported.
For more information: http://www.NuclearPlanet.com/oil.html
For pdf of paper: http://www.NuclearPlanet.com/boost.pdf
Herndon, J. M. (2010) Impact of recent discoveries on petroleum and natural gas exploration: emphasis on India. Current Science, 98, 772-779.
Source:
J. Marvin Herndon, Ph.D.
Transdyne Corporation

For decades, an unsuspected geological blunder has limited crucial technical understanding of how, where and why petroleum and natural gas deposits form. Exposing and correcting that vital mistake offers the promise of new insights and potentially vast new energy-resource discoveries.
Since the 1930s, the idea of mantle convection has been inextricably rooted in common geological interpretations of Earth’s dynamics. In a paper just published in the March 25, 2010, issue of Current Science, San Diego geophysicist J. Marvin Herndon of Transdyne Corporation discloses a very serious problem with the prevailing concept of convection in the Earth’s mantle and reveals the profound implications on oil and gas exploration.
For decades geologists and geophysicists have assumed that convection occurs within the Earth’s mantle. But according to Herndon’s discovery, Earth-mantle convection is physically impossible. As he explains in his paper, the mantle is compressed by its own weight and the weight of the crust, so that its bottom is about 62% more dense than the top. The negligible amount of thermal expansion that might occur at the bottom, less than 1%, cannot cause bottom-mantle matter to float to the surface or make the mantle top-heavy, necessary conditions for convection.

Herndon’s discovery has revolutionary implications for geologists, who have for decades misapplied mathematical convection-justification relationships to the gravity-compressed mantle; such relationships are only valid for incompressible fluids.
Familiar topical names, such as Pangaea, Gondwanaland and Plate Tectonics, will begin to fade into history, replaced by a more correct 21st Century understanding of geology and geodynamics without mantle convection.

Source: A relealse from Mr. Herndon

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Avogadro and His Constant

Read an intersting account of the development of Avogadro's constant in a 16 page article.

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/chemistry/documents/the_constant_of_avogadro.pdf

The interseting point in the article is the paragraph.


Our current interpretation of gas structure has its origins in a chapter in the book
‘Hydrodynamik’ by Bernoulli, published in 1738, but this work was overlooked for
more than a hundred years. Also, in 1845 J.J.Waterston, a school teacher in Bombay,
submitted a paper to the Royal Society with the title ‘On the physics of media
composed of free and perfectly elastic molecules in a state of motion’, in which many
of the currently accepted concepts of kinetic theory were set out. Unfortunately this
paper was rejected by the society as “nothing but nonsense, unfit even for reading
before the society”. However, the manuscript was rediscovered in the archives by
Lord Rayleigh who deduced that it was essentially correct, and the paper was
published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1892 (15). Rayleigh wrote a preamble
to the paper describing its treatment, in which he says that the referee of Waterston’s
paper was one of the best qualified authorities of the day, and that the failure to
publish the paper probably held back the subject by 10 to 15 years. In the meantime
there had been major developments of the theory, particularly by Clausius, Maxwell,
and Boltzmann.

I came to know of Mr. Waterston from a talk delivered by Dr. M. Bama, director of TIFR on 10.3.2010 on the occasion of Foundation day of IIT Bombay.