Bootstrap Geologist: My Life in Science

5. The U.S. Geological Survey

5 The U.S. Geological Survey All About Pete Cars, all shapes and sizes, were backed up for blocks. Reaching the gas pumps could take hours. That’s the way it was during the height of the 1970s oil embargoes. The American dream had become a nightmare, and Congress responded by literally throwing money at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The nation needed a quick fix! Congress needed information, and the United States badly needed to expand domestic oil production. How bad was it? How much oil was left in the United States? We needed to know! The USGS had what could be called a sleepy Oil and Gas Branch based in Denver, Colorado, that had existed for years but had long ago fallen by the wayside. Apparently, they mainly shuffled a lot of paper and kept records. Then along came one of my longtime friends from Shell. I had been his diving technician when he did his six-month assignment at the old Coral Gables Laboratory. We had been good friends before I went off to the Persian Gulf, and he had been hired away from Shell by the USGS. His mission ? Go to Denver and revive the sleepy Oil and Gas Branch. His name was Peter R. Rose, a down-to-earth grassroots Texan. When we first met in 1961, Pete had a master’s degree from the University of Texas. Although his graduate work was in carbonate stratigraphy1 —he had studied under Bob Folk, a famous “guru” of carbonate sedimentology—Shell had put him to work in their Houston office as a micropaleontologist, or “bug-picker,” to use the oil-patch vernacular. He worked with Tertiary rocks of the Gulf Coast, where he studied tiny fossil foraminifera, the “bugs.” He came to Coral Gables to study the living ones Bootstrap Geologist: My Life in Science 118 in Florida Bay. Maybe seeing how the live ones live would help us better understand the dead ones that were so important, in turn, to understanding the geologic age of rocks in Texas. Shell was making a big play in the Lower Cretaceous Edwards Reef beneath the Gulf Coastal Plain, so perhaps the study would help them find more oil and gas. Pete had taken a winding road full of forks to reach the Oil and Gas Branch. After six years with Shell, he went back to school and earned a PhD from the University of Texas. His dissertation study was on the regional stratigraphy of the Edwards Limestone. The subsurface part of his study drew on his Shell work when he was stationed in Corpus Christi, following his Coral Gables tour, and the surface-outcrop work came from the Edwards Plateau of west-central Texas, literally on his native soil where his family ranch still sits. In the course of mapping, Pete had found some distinctive thin gray limestone beds. They had been bored on top by rock-boring clams. These strata were more than one hundred million years old but looked exactly like the marine beds forming in the Persian Gulf—the ones containing the glass bottles, nuts and bolts, pottery, and so forth. What was interesting about Pete’s bored beds was that many of the borings—and their sediment fillings —were themselves penetrated by later borings. Some borings and their fillings had been bored many times. We had found the very same features in the modern Persian Gulf submarine beds! Needless to say, we were pulled together once again. Conventional Shell dogma held that such beds could only become cemented during periods of exposure, when the sea left them high and dry. Following the Dunham and Company dogma discussed earlier, Pete’s beds would have had to have been repeatedly exposed, then reimmersed in the sea and bored by the clams, in some cases many times. The sea would have been like a yo-yo! My discoveries in the Persian Gulf showed that such complications were not necessary. The layers could have formed in the same salty water the boring clams inhabited. Pete and I were fighting the same scientific battle. Pete had rejoined Shell in 1969, after a year of teaching at SUNY Stony Brook. The Vietnam War was on. It was the height of student rebellions. “Don’t trust anyone over thirty” was their slogan. Stony Brook experienced predawn drug raids and the faculty did not seem to care and the administration backed down under pressure. Pete, who came from an old Texas [3...