What's new in exploration

	Vol. 226 No. 3
PERRY A. FISCHER, EDITOR

We need a new word. Some words have more than one meaning. That’s not uncommon. Unfortunately, one word with several definitions is now so thoroughly misused that it may be having an impact on science and society in general. Certain groups (especially, religious fundamentalists/ literalists) are trying to change public policy by misuse of the word theory.

They downplay the term by saying, “It’s only a theory,” as if it was identical to a guess. Using my Internet dictionary from Google as a reference, they are correct if they are referring to definition six, “An assumption based on limited information or knowledge; a conjecture.”

However, definition one says, “A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena.”

Obviously, these two definitions are not even close. By putting, say, the Copernican theory of planets orbiting around the sun, or the theory of plate tectonics on an equal footing as a mere guess, well, that would seem silly to most scientists. But to many nonscientists and politicians, it’s also confusing to have the same word mean two completely different things. What is needed is a new term.

So, here’s the new rules: if it’s merely conjecture, call it a theory. But if it’s “A set of principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested...” well, in that case, let’s call it a theofactry. I don’t know if my new word will catch on, but the present situation of arguing new legislation and redefining science based on the misunderstood meaning of a word is getting too weird to ignore.

Plume wars. Occasionally, there are phenomena that fall somewhere between a guess and a theory (now, theofactry). That seems to be the case with mantle plumes. Merely suggesting either label could invoke the wrath of the opposing side.

A few folks might be old enough to remember Plate Tectonics and its evil cousin – Continental Drift. I hope you were on the right side of that great debate, which lasted well over a century – much too long with the hindsight of overwhelming evidence. The status quo struggled mightily to hold onto its dogma, using increasingly convoluted explanations (remember the land bridges from South America to Africa, with the snails (fossils) scurrying back and forth across the Atlantic?), but after much rancor and debate, the theofactry of plate tectonics emerged. So it is with great trepidation that I broach this “third rail” subject.

Don Anderson of CalTech is an anti-plumer. Here, from the Geological Society of London website, is a sample of his argument:

“The plume hypothesis is unsatisfactory on many levels. First, it is not scientific. It cannot be tested. It has so many variants, exceptions, rationalizations, ad hoc adjustments and failed predictions that it is unsatisfactory at the most basic level. It started out as a simple, elegant testable idea. It has now been tested and falsified. Falsification, in science, is usually difficult, but in this case, all the predictions in the original papers have been shown to be false. More telling, the original evidence used to support the proposal, has been discredited and abandoned.”

“The plume hypothesis is now an inelegant, (“sophisticated”), even ugly, idea. Hotspots are not hot, and they are not fixed, yet the idea survives. Occam would not be pleased. It is the same kind of wishful thinking and self-delusion that we associate with Ptolemy, Piltdown, phlogiston, polywater and cold fusion.”

Dr. Gillian Foulger is another one of the anti-plumers that helps keep the controversy going. Consider this excerpt:

“In 1963, Wilson suggested that there is a hotspot in the mantle, which is forming the time-progressive Hawaiian island chain as the Pacific seafloor moves over it. Within a few years, this hotspot had migrated to the core-mantle boundary, replicated itself into 20 plumes, each 3,000 km tall and with a giant plume head, and these were driving the newly discovered tectonic plates. It was pointed out that, given the rate at which plumes were multiplying, someone urgently needed to prove that they don’t exist before it was too late. Despite this timely warning, by 1999 the number of deep mantle plumes in the Earth had reached a critical 5,200. Fortunately, the crisis was averted in 2003 when their number crashed to only nine.”

“These extraordinary fluctuations in the plume population probably tell us more about Earth science than the Earth. The fundamental predictions of the plume hypothesis have not been confirmed, despite three decades of intensive work. These predictions are a) narrow, vertical seismic structures traversing the whole mantle; b) high temperatures; and c) relative fixity of ‘hotspots’.”

These and many other articles can be found at: http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/ and www.mantleplumes.org, from which these excerpts were taken.

I last wrote on mantle plumes in this column in September 2003, available on www.worldoil.com in the archives, where there is also a map of the undersea Hawaiian seamount chain.

Chukchi well is a huge, new, old find. MMS apparently wants folks to get interested in the Chukchi Sea off the northwest coast of Alaska. Only about five wells have been drilled there, and one of them, the Burger discovery, was just reappraised by MMS. The new verdict is that Burger may be the largest hydrocarbon find on Alaska’s OCS. The well was drilled during the Chukchi exploration program, headed by Shell between 1989 and 1991. At the time, nobody was searching for gas, so not much attention was paid to the discovery.

The new re-appraisal has lifted the most-likely recoverable reserves from an original estimate of 5 Tcf of gas to a new estimate of 14 Tcf. The estimate indicates a possible range from 8 Tcf to 27 Tcf. Estimates for condensate range from 371 million to 1.4 billion bbl, with 724 million bbl the most likely. The Burger structure is a 25-mi diameter dome, sitting on a structural ridge that branches southwest across the center of the Chukchi shelf, from a point on the Barrow Arch about 50 miles northwest of Barrow. The Chukchi sandstone forms an exact analogy to similar rift-sequence sandstones that form the reservoirs at the Kuparuk River field in the central North Slope.