Are Old Oil Fields Refilling?. Whoa. This Newsday article indicates that the "impossible" may be happening: old, depleted oil fields are refilling with more oil. [kuro5hin.org]

"No one has been more astonished by the potential implications of our work than myself,” said analytic chemist Jean Whelan, at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in Massachusetts. "There already appears to be a large body of evidence consistent with ... oil and gas generation and migration on very short time scales in many areas globally,” she wrote in the journal Sea Technology.

Interesting if this is a useable form of petroleum. More interesting is this:

"The clams were the first thing I noticed,” he added. "They were pretty big, like the size of your hand, and it was obvious they had red blood inside, which is unusual. And these long tubes -- 3, 4 and 5 feet long -- we didn't know what they were, but they started bleeding red fluid, too. We didn't know what to make of it.”

The biologists they consulted did know what to make of it. "The experts immediately recognized them as chemo-synthetic communities,” creatures that get their energy from hydrocarbons -- oil and gas -- rather than from ordinary foods. So these animals are very much like, but still different from, recently discovered creatures living near very hot seafloor vent sites in the Pacific, Atlantic and other oceans.

The difference, Kennicutt said, is that the animals living around cold seeps live on methane and oil, while the creatures growing near hot water vents exploit sulfur compounds in the hot water.

Riffage: That's either some serious adaptation going on there, or else there are whole ecosystems living in and near these fields that we've never seen. If there are creatures that burn hydrocarbons for their metabolism, what is their waste product? Could we use them to clean up oil spills? Can we embed them in the soil surrounding gas stations in the hopes that they'll eat up any leaked gasoline? What about using them to clean up superfund sites, if we can get them into the area?

8:15:21 AM