Don-interesting post. I first heard of Thomas Gold in the early 80s when I worked for an oil company (Cathryn, even though I am only 25 years old now-I was a prodigy). He proposes that oil and gas come out of the mantle. He was not entirely dismissed for this, but I'm pretty certain that it is KNOWN that (almost all?) oil comes from decayed organic material. By the way, I sent the link to your post and Gold's page to my wife, who is working on the lumpy area offshore that may be caused by Izmit EQ in 1999-so this page does sometimes prove itself useful in that way. I think you are correct that he is off-base on a lot of his earthquake stuff-for example, he may not be aware of how large an area of seafloor moves during a great subduction earthquake, and that quakes of that size take a couple of minutes to propagate their full length, and that some other tsunamis are the result of submarine slides, either associated with earthquakes or not.....

I worked with L. Tim Long in the mid 80s as a grad student. He had a hypothesis that he may have published in soemthing like Seimological Research Letters (??) where he proposes that the New Madrid zone is the result of fluids at the base of the crust that work their way up, set off a few earthquakes, and then eventually the area shuts itself back off-forever. The really strange thing about New Madrid is that the faults there barely offset layers that are 50 million years old-so there have not been that many quakes-the several episodes of quakes in the last couple thousand years can not be projected back in time (someone correct me if I'm off on this-I think I'm about correct here). Long thinks/thought that the East Tennessee seismic zone is in the early stages of development towards a major quake-don't know if this takes hundreds, thousands, or 100s of thousands of years.....Chris