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Originally Posted by Troubleshooter
What we have here is a case of dueling geologists/geophysicists.
Which doctor is more right?
I'm not sure that any of us here are educated enough in that field to pick the right story.
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Gold (now deceased) was neither a geologist nor a geophysicist. He was trained as physicist and did some work in astrophysics. One of his theories (which had no basis in the evidence available at the time) was that the first lunar landing would result in the space craft being buried under hundreds of feet of loose dust which he postulated covered the surface of the moon. We all know how correct he was on that one.
The paper which you cite by him was never published in any peer-reviewed scientific journal of any credibility. I might also add that as a biologist, I have great difficulty with Gold's extremely shakey hypothesis that vast qunatities of anerobic bacteria live deep below the surface of the earth. Even if this were true, the most likely by-product of such colonies would be methane, not petroleum. Bacteria are far more aligned with the animal kingdom than the plant, due to differences in cell wall composition, among other things. Anerobic bacteria are unlikely to build up enough carbonaceous materials to form things like coal beds or petroleum reserves. It takes plants performing the miracle of photosynthesis to do this.