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2: A Beacon in the Blackness
- Indiana University Press
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35 35 A Beacon in the Blackness Just three years after the publication of Pander’s book on the conodont fishes, oil was discovered in the United States. A new black liquid flowed out of the ground and into American minds, altering them forever. (The conodont played no part in this discovery, but it too was altered). Notorious wastefulness followed. Successive wells ran dry. But calls for conservation fell on deaf ears, as America developed its obsession with the automobile. In 1921 there were 10.5 million motor vehicles on the road. By the end of the decade there were 26.5 million. Demand for oil grew exponentially, but without the predicted oil shortage as discovery continued to outpace demand. A plague of oil derricks advancedacrosstheAmericanlandscape,fromPennsylvania,NewYork, West Virginia, Ohio and Indiana into California, the mid-continent (Kansas and Oklahoma), the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast, and Illinois .1 In the unregulated American economy, oil was soon in overproductionandpricesplummeted ,falling belowthatofwaterinsome states during the drought years of the early 1930s. By then the once buoyant economy was in freefall and oil had played no small part in that collapse. As each state had located its own easy resources, so it profited from an oil boom, but as those wells ran dry, oil producers were forced to drill deeper and at greater expense. Ignorance of geology had led some wells to be drilled a thousand feet below the deepest productive horizon , while others had been abandoned before the oil-bearing strata had been reached. Such imprecision had accompanied attempts for coal in England more than a century before, but there a remedy had been found. The surveyor and engineer William Smith showed that rocks two 36 The Great Fossil Enigma had a consistent order and that each contained its own peculiar fossils. This information was then used to correlate one stratum with another across country and to assign to each a relative age. This branch of geology –“English geology,” Sedgwick called it–became better known as stratigraphy, and it dominated the science in the nineteenth century. It permitted ores, particularly coal, to be located intelligently and consistently rather than through luck and brawn. Oil is a rather different kind of mineral resource, but this same knowledge could help find it. There really was no excuse for committing these old errors in the New World, except, of course, for that same race for riches that had once fueled an English coal prospecting fever.2 Thescienceofgeologyeventuallybegantoslowlyenterthethinking of American oil companies around the turn of the century when it was understoodthatoiloftenaccumulatedunderanticlines(rocksfoldedinto arches). However useful such knowledge, it often proved insufficient. By 1913,forexample,alltheknownanticlinesinIllinoishadbeendrilled.Oil productioninthatstatefellandcontinuedtodosountil1936.Itonlyrose again when new technologies were introduced into oilfield exploration. Perhaps surprisingly, no one was consistently examining the cuttings brought to the surface in drilling operations. Ordinary fossils–the things Smith had used to order his rocks–were often destroyed by the drill. After World War I, however, attention turned to microscopic fossils , and particularly to those simple single-celled animals known as foraminifera. By 1925, the seven largest oil companies on the West Coast possessed laboratories that employed some twenty-three people in geological investigations. Soon nearly every wildcat was sampled and studied , and hundreds of geologists were engaged in this work. And as the paleontological community grew and diversified, so it professionalized itself. Fossil-focused organizations burgeoned. The Paleontological Society was established in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1908, when “the immenselyrichoilfieldsoftheMid -Continentwerebeingdiscovered.”The American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) was founded in Tulsa in 1917. Its Bulletin grew from 159 to 1,319 pages per annum in just eight years. By then it was issued monthly and was under the control of editor extraordinaire Raymond Moore of the University of Kansas. Its physical weight spoke of how geology in America had changed: The [3.91.8.23] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:56 GMT) A Beacon in the Blackness 37 science was now dominated by a deeply utilitarian outlook that sought onlytoservetheneedsofbusiness.TheSocietyof EconomicPaleontologists and Mineralogists (SEPM) was established about a decade later, at a meeting of the AAPG, again in Tulsa. SEPM’s focus was to be devoted almostentirelytothe utilitarianscienceofmicroscopicfossils,ormicrofossils . Its Journal of Paleontology first appeared in July 1927.3 With this changing professional demographic, paleontology more generallyunderwentashiftofemphasis:Universitiesbegantointroduce courses in “micropaleontology.” At the University of Chicago, Carey Croneis set up a masters program in the subject, converting the top floor of the Walker Museum into a laboratory. Paleontological doctorates and masters...