WHOI Scientists Find Ancient Asphalt Domes

The deposits of apparent undersea volcanoes hardened into domes that discovered recently by scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and UC Santa Barbara (UCSB). About 35,000 years ago, a series of volcanoes deposited massive flows of petroleum 10 miles offshore and formed at about 700 feet deep in the waters off California's jewel of a coastal resort, Santa Barbara, a group of football-field-sized asphalt domes unlike any other underwater features known to exist.

Their report-co-authored with researchers from UC Davis, the University of Sydney and the University of Rhode Island-appeared online in the Journal Nature Geoscience. The work was funded by the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Energy and the Seaver Institute.

"It was an amazing experience, driving along...and all of a sudden, this mountain is staring you in the face," said Christopher M. Reddy, director of WHOI's Coastal Ocean Institute and one of the study's senior authors, as he described the discovery of the domes using the deep submersible vehicle Alvin. Moreover, the dome was teeming with undersea life. "It was essentially an oasis," he said, "almost like an artificial reef."

What really piqued the interest of Reddy-a marine geochemist who studies oil spills-was the chemical composition of the dome: "very unusual asphalt material," he said. "There aren't that many opportunities to study oil that's been sitting around on the bottom of the ocean for 35,000 years."

Reddy's chance came courtesy of UCSB earth scientist and lead author David L. Valentine, who first came upon the largest of the structures-named Il Duomo-and brought back a chunk of the brittle, black material in 2007 from an initial dive in Alvin, which WHOI operates for the US Navy. Valentine and Reddy were on a cruise aboard the WHOI-operated research vessel Atlantis, following up on undersea mapping survey by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) and the work of UCSB earth scientist Ed Keller.

"The largest [dome] is about the size of two football fields, side by side and as tall as a six-story building," Valentine said. Alvin's robotic arm snapped off a piece of the unusual formation, secured it in a basket and delivered it to Reddy aboard Atlantis.

Without access to the sophisticated equipment in his Woods Hole lab, Reddy employed a "25-cent glass tube, the back of a Bic pen and a little nail polish remover" to analyse the crusty substance. He used the crude tools like a mortar and pestle to grind the rock, "and literally within several minutes, it became a thick oil."

After making some schedule changes, Valentine cleared the way for him and Reddy to take Alvin back to several sites in 2007. This work also set the stage for a follow-up study in September 2009, when the investigators returned to the domes with Alvin and the Autonomous Undersea Vehicle (AUV) Sentry to study the structures. They were joined by, among others, WHOI collaborators Dana Yoerger, Richard Camilli and Robert K. Nelson and Oscar Pizarro, now at the University of Sydney.

What it looked like was "incredibly weathered," said Reddy. "That means nature had taken away a lot of compounds. These mounds of black material were the last remnants of oil that exploded up from below. To see nature doing this on its own was an unbelievable finding."

A few asphalt-like undersea structures have been reported, says Valentine, "but not anything exactly like these...no large structures like we see here." He estimates that the dome structures contain about 100,000 tons of residual asphalt and compares them to an underwater version of the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, complete with the fossils of ancient animals.

The researchers are not sure exactly why sea life has taken up residence around the asphalt domes, but one possibility is that because the oil has become benign over the years that some creatures are able to actually feed off it and get energy from it. They may also be "thriving" on tiny holes in the dome areas that release minute amounts of methane gas, Reddy says.

Valentine: "One future direction is to try and actually drill into them," he says. "We also need to turn it over to some geologists to figure out where this oil is really coming from. More fundamentally, we're going to look at the actual degradation of the oil by microorganisms and maybe even see what organisms are trapped in this...very much like the La Brea Tar Pits."

From a chemical point of view, Reddy says he will continue to probe the question of exactly which of the chemicals that make up the domes "stayed around" all these years.

"Instead of this taking place at a refinery, nature used a variety of its own tools," he said, to manufacture the asphalt substance. With some heating and a few chemical tweaks, he added, this is essentially the same material that paves highways and parking lots. After all, it is California.