Chile Forum

Thought this was an interesting article from slashdot.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl ... 04/1835205

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008 ... -fung.html

I don't really see them clarifying where they found it, but the photo appears to be the Chilean side of the mountains.

The irony for Chile would be if they dammed up the rivers destroying the fungus that could solve the worlds energy problems.

It is in Southern Chile.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... d=96574076

It sounds like it might be a possible explanation also for the long life of trees and rot resistance in such a humid environment of Southern Chile. That is my theory, but the microbes kill other microbes, kind of like painting a wood post with motor oil.

Really interesting article-the last part also interesting:

But beyond the biofuel implications, Strobel said that because the fungus can manufacture what we would normally think of as components of crude oil, it casts some doubt on the idea that crude oil is a fossil fuel.

"It may be the case that organisms like this produced some — maybe not all — but some of the world's crude," Strobel said.

Laura55llc wrote:Really interesting article-the last part also interesting:

But beyond the biofuel implications, Strobel said that because the fungus can manufacture what we would normally think of as components of crude oil, it casts some doubt on the idea that crude oil is a fossil fuel.

"It may be the case that organisms like this produced some — maybe not all — but some of the world's crude," Strobel said.

See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiotic_oil

A couple years ago there was a story from India about a guy who was doing something similar. I think it was a mixture of plants in this case instead of a fungus but he was making fuel from it. These breakthroughs tend to disappear and their inventors either disappear or end up dead. Courtesy of big oil.

The abiotic theory of oil production makes more sense to me than the fairy tales about dino's and bio-matter. etc. I tend to believe it.