Spooky phenomenon may mark energy deposits.

The origins of forest rings have been a source of mystery since first discovered 50 years ago by aerial photographers in Ontario's remote north.

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Now a Sudbury researcher believes the thousands of forest rings dotting the boreal landscape north of Highway 11 could be a potential source of methane gas energy.

Stew Hamilton, a geochemist with the Ontario Geological Survey (OGS), has been hitting the lecture circuit lately, talking with Canadian government officials, Ontario prospectors and especially oil and gas developers to convince them to cast their eyes upon Northern Ontario.

Forest rings have nothing to do with crop circles. Hunters and hikers can walk right through them without noticing.

Best appreciated from the air against the dense bush, they are characterized by a ring of stunted, light-coloured growth on the outside with further stunting in the middle.

Hamilton has been studying their origins for the past seven years to gain a better understanding both of how they're formed and what potential energy reservoirs may lie beneath.

The latter will be the subject of this summer's research work in the James Bay Lowlands.

Known as the world's largest non-permafrost swamp, the lowlands are a heavily forested, virtually uninhabitable environment Hamilton calls "a swampy green fresh water ocean."

Inside a 150,000-square kilometre study area that encompasses about one-sixth of Ontario, the OGS has documented 1,600 forest rings.

Hamilton estimates there are probably five times that many.

In 1998, Hamilton stumbled on to forest ring research while studying another related phenomenon called reduced chimneys, which are big centres of negative charge that occur over metal deposits.

It's an enormous discovery that's changing the field of exploration geochemistry worldwide. Every major mining company in the world has taken an interest in research on reduced chimneys.

About the same time OGS made that discovery, Sudbury prospector Bob Komarechka approached them about some forest rings he discovered 25 km east of Hearst, thinking they were surface signatures of diamond-bearing kimberlites (kimberlites are extremely negatively charged). Some drillers hoping for diamonds have gotten into trouble, since about 80 per cent of forest rings contain pockets of natural gas.

In one instance, an exploration crew searching for carbonatite at Martison Lake, north of Hearst, drilled into gas and nearly lost their rig.

"It blew all the mud out of the hole and the drillers ran for their lives," says Hamilton.

Five years ago, the OGS determined they were not kimberlites at all, but electrochemical cells, giant naturally occurring batteries.

Practically any source of negative charge will cause forest rings.

"And everything geologists are interested in is negatively charged: oil, gas, coal, mineral deposits and kimberlites," says Hamilton.

Negatively charged in the centre and positively charged on the periphery, the rings are most noticeable in the carbonate soil of Northern Ontario.

The current flow causes an acidic reaction that dissolves away at the ground causing it to slump as much as two metres, creating a circular swamp.

"Add vinegar to baking soda and it's the same thing," says Hamilton

The occurrences always form a perfect circle as with any magnetic, electric or gravity force field.

But where the negative charge comes from remains the unanswered question. And Hamilton doesn't know how much gas can potentially lie beneath.

"We're very keen on finding that out, and that's what this summer's work is about."

Hamilton says they may discover they don't have tools to conclusively produce a reserve estimate.

"We'd like to find a relatively inexpensive way to get a ball park figure."

They will fly in to 12 remote sites from last summer's work and install some hand-augered monitoring wells and diffusion samplers to obtain gas samples and to determine where it's coming from.

In the meantime, Hamilton, a distinguished lecturer for the Association of Applied Geochemists, wants to get out to Calgary and let developers and engineers in Alberta's Oil Patch know these things are here.

"Unconventional sources of natural gas are becoming more interesting to geologists" as conventional deep reserves are being tapped out, he says. "And there's a huge amount of gas in unconventional reserves, probably at least ten times as in all the conventional reserves that are left."

Hamilton says it's very unlikely Northern Ontario forest rings contain oil deposits since it is young methane--only a few thousand years old--being generated now by the bacteral decomposition of organic matter.

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Other clusters of gaseous rings he's studied contained marine sediment, another series of rings come from unknown deeper gas sources and another is likely coal-bed methane.

Coal-bed methane exploration is all the rage in the gas industry, especially in Alberta.

"There's far more gas in coal bed than in all their reserves combined."

Used in the western U.S., the methane is retrieved by drilling wells into the deposit, pumping out water in the coal seam, then extracting the methane. Problem is, pumping out ground water drains farmers' wells and the disposed water contains impurities, such as salt. In Canada, Hamilton says, coal bed methane is far more environmentally friendly to extract.

www.mndm.gov.on.ca

By IAN ROSS

Northern Ontario Business