How Did That Oil Get To Alaska?

Maybe it drained out of Joe Barton's now-empty head.

Comments

[Jack is Back!]

Everyone knows that there were more dinosaurs in Saudi Arabia and Iran than anyone else. They still are.

[Charlie (Colorado)]

Imagine the damage those guys could do if they had real jobs.

[cboldt]

What I want to konw is "How did all that methane get to Jupiter?"

[boris]

Klingons

[Ignatz]

Well, I looked at both links and can't see that Barton looked any worse than Chu.

Climatic warmth is not a prerequisite for oil formation. Indeed, since marine animals are the primary source of oil formation and tend to thrive in cold waters both of them were about equally wrong.
Relatively rapid sedimentation is required but high and low latitude rivers are notoriuously silty; even more so marine terminating glaciers.
Barton was wrong to say that Alaska was necessarily much warmer previously (even though it was, including at its present location) but Chu was equally wrong to accept the same 'warmth' premise for petroleum formation and account for it by continental drift.
The only difference being that Chu is a Nobel prize winning scientist and presumably should be held to a somewhat higher standard.

[roux]

I'm waiting on the man made tectonic plate movement theory. Hey, we could do a little cap and trade and even make man made tectonic plate movement a crime.

[sbw]

Arrest that San Andreas Fault, officer!

[rhodeymark]

The same way that manure got to Washington?

[clarice]

rhodey is the winner in my book.

[daddy]

Both of them are morons. We get our oil up here in Alaska from ">http://www.adn.com/rural/story/604423.html"> Hugo Chavez, Obama's new best buddy.

[Pofarmer]

And Ameren UE just announced they are scrapping plans for a second reactor station at Callaway Nuclear plant. So much for the hundreds of high paying UNION jobs that would have created. So much for "Energy Independence" Pheh.

Change if you can keep your lights on.

If we run this bunch out on a rail, where the hell do we run them too? This is ridiculous. All of our energy infrastructure is getting older, and they wanna put 100KW hydrokinetic generators on the Mississippi. Whoop de do.. Smart grid. Yippee, that'll be great with no generation to put in it. We won't need smart meters, we'll need magic meters.

This is gonna be a long, long, long reccession folks, and this gang is doing everything possible to prolong it.3

[narciso]

That's the sad state of it, these fools put us more at the mercy of PDVSA, and Lukoil and ARAMCO. And those folks have our best interests at heart, I'm sure I could swear some one said something about that about 8 months ago, but maybe my memory is failing.

We are carbon based life forms, most
chemical processes release carbon dioxide in some way shape or form. Coal was one the major drivers of the industrial revolution, do we really want to back to the horse and buggy days. You can have pristine
environment or plentiful energy by not both. And with out population moving to 325-350 Million, you think we're going to need
the latter.

[Pofarmer]

You can have pristine
environment or plentiful energy by not both

Actually, you can get DAMN CLOSE to both, but the "greens" abolish every attempt. Maybe when the lights start going out people will start to get a clue. But, by that time we'll just be that many years further behind, that much broker for all the stupid shit we "tried" and that much more impoverished to even try anything, while, all the time industries leave in droves because, frankly, the U.S. is a suckass place to try to do business. It's hard to manufacture if you have to build a power plant next to the plant(that you can't get a permit for, BTW). Creating and saving jobs, my ass.

[lurking]

Tom ought to know better than to drink the Kool-Aid of the Guardian's Environmental blog. Granted, my research is not exhaustive, but the tectonic forces mostly covered marine deposits made when the climate was a lot warmer than it is now. So Barton was more correct than Chu, who confidently asserted that tectonic forces had moved the oil to where it is. Sure, it may have moved some, but Barton has the advantage in this interchange.

I like to call Chu the Confused Physicist. And I ran across a hint somewhere that he stole the idea of laser trapping, for which he got the Nobel Prize, from someone else. A fit member of Obama's administration, I'd say.
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[lurking]

Ah, I see Ignatz has already worked around my point. But isn't it so, Ignatz, that these stores are in formations, or leaked from formations, that were laid down when the earth was a lot warmer?

IANAGeologist, but what little I've read about it suggests so.
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