2006.04.22 |

Blood Metal

I had run into some members of CEC Australia (associated with the LaRouche organisation) last month, and they had some interesting ideas that I wanted to check into further (socio-political not geological). So I gave them some contact details and they phoned me last night. It didn’t take long for me to realise that this wasn’t a group I wanted to be involved in (anyone who repeatedly uses the word ‘truth’ creeps me out). But being a ‘nice’ person I didn’t hang up on them. Towards the end of the phone call the conversation strayed into geology. They have some very strange ideas about geology, in particular the origin of groundwater, ore deposits and hydrocarbons. Todays bizarre pseudo-science topic is: iron ore deposits form from the blood and bones of animals.

PREMISE No# 1: Iron ore deposits form from the blood of organisms

[J]ust like the iron deposit, which is created by the animals which died and left their skeletons behind as the iron ore (Vernadsky in LaRouche 2005a)

This is apparently based on Vladimir Vernadsky (1863-1945) concept of “geosphere, biosphere and noosphere” (or human cognition). (Wikipedia, 2006)

A WMS PROPOSED BLOOD METAL MODEL

… [W]e depend upon mineral deposits which were left by dead animals and dead plants, millions of years ago. We call those “ores.” … Animals, selectively, took certain things out of the ambient environment. Some use more iron, some use more of something else. These animals or plants died: And their little dead bodies left the skeletons behind. The skeletons contained these minerals, in certain forms. We dig, where these animals died, or where they were concentrated in dying—as in seas … (LaRouche 2005b, pp1-2)

Assuming there was some mechanism that allowed the preservation and concentration of iron from haemoglobin in blood (I’m afraid my imagination doesn’t stretch that far), it should be possible to calculate a maximum amount of iron that can be deposited using:

(1) The ‘typical’ amount of iron in a unit of blood
(2) The volume of blood per ‘average’ organism belonging to the animal kingdom
(3) Potential biomass (haemoglobin bearing only) present/year
(4) The it time for that biomass to turn over (ie die, and assuming of course, that the next generation don’t eat it)
(5) Some variable for the chance that an organism will be subjected to preservation long enough for the blood-sucking mechanism to operate on it

Variables 1 to 4 would show the amount of iron potentially available for the mystery mechanism to work on ie how much iron animals actually possess globally per unit of time.? Variable 5 would allow for the percentage of this iron that is actually available to be concentrated.

Another factor that needs to be taken into account is that the bulk of BIFs were formed before multicellular organisms had evolved (sometime between 600 and 900 million years ago, while the bulk of BIFs formed 1.9 to 2.5 billion years ago). So, I am a little confused as to how all this blood managed to travel back in time to form iron deposits. Despite this, I propose that the blood of haemoglobin-bearing organisms is sucked up by some vampiric-like being who travels back in time to spit the iron out in bands (which may later be enriched into iron ore deposits).

The Real Science

NOTES: I am not going to differentiate between a mineral deposit and an ore deposit, as the difference is economic value and so not relevant here. Also, I have only included primary mechanisms, not the secondary concentration required to turn it into an ore-deposit.

Biochemical sediment: Solomon and Groves summarised possible genesis of Banded Iron Formation (BIFs), such as the Hamersley iron province in Western Australia. The most accepted model is the formation by sedimentation in a marine basin. The mechanism proposed is up-welling of anoxic ocean water carrying reduced iron (Holland 1984 in Solomon and Groves 2000). The anoxic, iron-rich water mixed with a layer of oxygenated water, the iron was oxidised to ferric iron and the iron settled out as sediment. It has been proposed that the increased oxygenation of the oceans may have been a result of the release of oxygen during photosynthesis (2000 pp159-160). The other favoured model for BIF formation is a volcanic-exhalative systems ie a buoyant, reduced, iron-rich, black smoker plume (Cameron 1983a in Solomon and Groves 2000). In a shallow ocean the plume may travel laterally along an interface if the surface of the ocean is reached before all of the buoyancy (energy) is lost (Solomon and Groves 2000).

BIFs are restricted in time with the bulk of iron formation between 2.5 and 1.9 billion years ago (Solomon and Groves, 2000 pp150). The reason for why there is a time constraint is more speculative, but may be related to the begin oxidation of the oceans by blue-green algae. While the oxygen levels in the oceans/atmosphere of the Proterozoic were increasing, they were still low enough that ‘large-scale’ transport of reduced iron could occur. It is the high levels of oxygen in the modern atmosphere that prevents this from happening at such a large-scale in the Phanerozoic (Solomon and Groves, 2000 pp161).?