Dinosaurs under the Aurora

3. A Black Gold Rush Sets the Stage for Discovery in Alaska

25 3 A BLACK GOLD RUSH SETS THE STAGE FOR DISCOVERY IN ALASKA If you have seen the icon for the Sinclair Oil Company, a silhouette of a four-legged long-neck dinosaur, then you may have concluded that petroleum and dinosaurs go hand in hand. The misconception that petroleum is derived from dinosaurs is still quite prevalent even among those who are not familiar with the Sinclair symbol. Physicists and chemists in the 1800s considered petroleum to be nonbiogenic and concluded that petroleum was a residue of the formation of the Earth. This hypothesis was discarded by the 1950s and replaced with a theory that petroleum had a biogenic origin , but there was no consensus on the specific types of organisms that were transformed into oil. Geochemical research over the last three decades has focused on plankton and microorganisms as the biomass that combines with rock-forming processes to end up as the flame on your stove or the gas in your tank. It is now clear that most petroleum is derived from ancient planktonic microorganisms rather than dinosaurs and their vertebrate kin.1 Still, interestingly, there is an important and valid connection between the discovery of oil and dinosaurs—especially in Alaska. When the tale of the discovery of Alaska’s dinosaurs is recounted, the role of oil exploration takes center stage. For it was a field geologist engaged in the search for oil during the 1960s who collected and recorded fossils that would later be identified as dinosaurian. Petroleum exploration and development that goes back to the early nineteenth century in Alaska is what ultimately set the stage for this exciting and unexpected discovery of dinosaurs. Oil seeps and other surface finds were reported from several parts of Alaska in the 1800s, including the Alaska Peninsula and the Arctic Coastal Plain. From the early 1900s to the 1950s, subsurface discoveries spurred on further efforts along the northern Alaska Peninsula and the Yakataga area in the southeastern edge of the Gulf of Alaska. Several large oil companies were involved, but most of the oil fields were found by independents, also known as wildcatters. But with the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry, which in the early 1950s was still controlled by the British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the days of independent oil drillers in the Arctic would come to end. Following the assassination of Iranian prime minister Ali Razmara in 1951 and much political unrest in Iran, Iranian petroleum resources Alaska’s Dinosaurs and the Search for Oil Dinosaurs under the Aurora 26 were nationalized, and Anglo-Iranian Oil morphed into British Petroleum (BP). The loss of its monopoly in Iran forced BP to look elsewhere for oil. It extensively analyzed potential petroleum-rich areas throughout the world; recognizing important similarities between the oil-rich Zagreb foothills of Iran and Iraq and those of the Brooks Range, it eventually made its way to Alaska’s Arctic and was soon followed by Shell, Chevron, and several other oil companies. Subsequently, in the 1960s, the much smaller Richfield Oil Company would join BP and the others in northern Alaska. In a bizarre twist of fate, Richfield would become the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) and would then make the biggest discovery in what would be called Alaska’s “North Slope oil bonanza.”2 Oil exploration in Arctic Alaska during the 1960s and ’70s brought forth a new label for this region and a new term to the worldwide petroleum lexicon—North Slope. This appears to have grown out of general references to the area as the north slope of the Brooks Range and then more expansively as “Alaska’s North Slope.” The region is now almost universally referred to as just the “North Slope.” The Brooks Range is a spectacular topographic boundary, delimiting the Arctic Coastal Plain (see figures 1.2 and 3.1) that spreads north from the foothills of the Brooks Range to the scalloped edge of the Beaufort Sea and the Arctic Ocean. Although the Brooks Range seemed the most likely place to explore for oil because it held the kinds of rocks and earthly contortions that can act as traps for crude oil, it did not prove to be the treasure trove that it first appeared to be.3 Like many aspects of Alaska, the range was not what it seemed at first glance. The oily treasure instead turned out to be nested far below the nearly flat, ice-locked sediments piled up by millennia of river...