Gold and Oil for the Taking!

Many vents are a potential bonanza. One 5,180 square km (2,000-square-mile) area with black smokers in the Bismarck Sea off Papua, New Guinea is thought to contain billions of dollars' worth of gold, silver and copper.

Scientists have found evidence of petroleum-like oil in chimneys as well. Oil is rarely found in rocks less than 2 - 3 million years old, but researchers Bernd Simoneit of Oregon State University and Borys Didyk of the Chilian national petroleum refinery in Concon have discovered evidence of oil formed in less than 5,000 years from organic sediments in vent chimneys in the Guyamas Basin in the Gulf of California.

These resources are not simply "for the taking," however, as the headline suggests. No significant reservoirs of young oil have been found to date. Even after resources are found, extraction is difficult, costly, and extremely controversial. The Australian company that recently obtained mining rights to the vents area within the territorial waters of New Guinea hopes to start commercial mining within five years. Their plans are hotly opposed by some environmentalists.

Geologists expect new knowledge discovered at vents will help them find metallic ore deposits on land. Such deposits formerly were under the ocean but were pushed up on land by the movement of the earth's tectonic plates.