Chapter XVIII: The Engine Beneath Our Feet
A discovery beneath Iceland’s mantle reveals a hydrogen-generating rock–water engine at Earth’s core, turning ancient descriptions of “the Deep" from metaphor to mechanism.
What follows did not add a new idea. It verified the last one at a depth no metaphor could reach.
Later still, in yet another “final pass of edits,” tired but relieved, MB sent me a link over WhatsApp and wrote, “You need to see this.” I opened it expecting another one of his long AI outputs from a deep biochemistry exploration he had done. Instead, it stopped me.
It came from a news article about a 2024 study published in Nature, which I stumbled across in December of 2025, just as I was trying to bring the book to a close. At that point, the Stone–Water Circuit theory had not yet taken shape. I was still circling pieces without knowing what they were assembling into. That paper turned out to be one of the missing structural elements, something that didn’t just support the theory once it existed, but helped force it into existence in the first place, requiring yet another chapter when I thought the work was already finished.
The Nature study was based on an analysis of fluids found after drilling deep under Iceland, a mantle-level window into rock, water, hydrogen, and alkalinity.
It was a study of fluids beneath mantle rock, not vents or surface chemistry, captured directly for the first time. Water meets fresh peridotite rock miles beneath our feet and generates hydrogen and alkalinity continuously, without seawater or surface conditions. A natural proton-gradient engine running inside the Earth itself. Sampled from the source.
I sat with it longer than I expected. If hydrogen and electrical charge naturally arise wherever water meets hot rock in the mantle, and have done so for millions of years, then life’s energy source looks built in, not accidental. Again, we are talking about a planet that makes energy the same way mitochondria do, automatically, constantly.
