Science: Skin Diving for Oil

The fashionable sport of skin diving has been taken up, rubber flippers, aqualungs and all, by serious geologists. Last week Magnolia Petroleum Co. told how its geological skin divers swim along the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico looking for information that will help find pools of oil.

Under the supervision of Ivan Alexander, Magnolia’s exploration chief, four full-fledged geologists and two technicians practiced skin diving until they could pass the Navy’s test for frogmen. Then, led by Dr. Daniel Feray, they embarked on the Gulf in a converted shrimp boat, went overboard and flapped along the bottom. Working in water up to 65 ft. deep off eastern Texas, they picked up samples of sediments, gathered sea creatures, e.g., sand dollars and mud-living worms, and studied the growth of marine vegetation. They pursued and captured in glass jars the bubbles of natural gas that rise from the bottom of the Gulf. While they swam in the silent depth, they heard clams clicking their shells. Louder sounds were the bangs of dynamite charges set off by oil prospectors a dozen miles away.

The scientific skin divers were not searching directly for oil. Their long-range purpose was to learn more about “stratagraphic traps.” Oil pools are comparatively easy to find by geophysical methods if the oil has accumulated in a “structural trap,” where pressure has forced the rock into a domed or up-slanted formation. But some of the biggest pools of oil have been found in masses of porous material, e.g., limestone reefs or sand bars, that were covered ages ago by oil-tight sediments. Such underground treasures (the prodigious East Texas field was one of them) seldom answer clearly when they are queried by the geologists’ instruments. Many of them have been found by pure accident.

Magnolia’s diving geologists hope to find clues that lead to stratagraphic traps. One possibility: using sea organisms as pointers. The clams, snails and other creatures that now live on the bottom of the

Gulf are not very different from their fossil ancestors. Each species has its preference for sand, mud or shell bottom. If scientific frogmen learn enough about the modern sea creatures, they may be able to use their forebears in the deep rocks to point where a reef or sand bar (now saturated with oil) lies hidden not far away.