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More on Sea Level and Oil

September 26th, 2014

Steve Ray Webb
September 26, 2014 · Edited

As promised, here is my post explaining more about sea level change and why it is important to the oil business. Let me preface it by saying that geologic time, as measured in millions of years, is foundational to all our work as petroleum geologists. If it were not so I would have plainly told you. But in this post I am biting off a very small piece, namely what sea level variation and its age-dating have to do with finding oil. I will do this using the simplest example and simplest terminology that comes to mind. The most important kind of rock for accumulating oil underground is sandstone. One of the best places to find nice clean sand in the modern environment is the seashore. Thus, it is a very good thing if an oil company can locate an ancient beach sandstone deep underground. How does one do this? Do we just assume that the beach is always where it has been and drill there? No. This because the beach has moved up and down the floor of the ocean depending on sea level rise and fall. As I showed on the sea level curves a couple days ago, there have been times when sea level has dropped easily more than 200 feet. In some cases this moved the location of the seashore more than 50 miles seaward. So, are oil companies going to drill 50 miles out into the deep ocean wildly hoping that an ancient seashore is underground in that location? No. There has to be a tremendous amount of justification to spend the millions of dollars required to drill even a single well. This is where age-dating of sea level changes comes into play. If the underground section of rock you are considering drilling happens to correspond in age to one of the large downward falls in sea level, this becomes a crucial piece of information. It provides the rationale for sandstone being where it would not normally be expected to be found. So, okay, maybe this sounds good, but does it work in practice? The last 30 years has seen an explosion of deep water drilling to the point that we are now drilling in water depths exceeding 10,000 feet! We have to put down 10,000 feet of steel pipe straight down into the ocean before we can even begin drilling. Incredible! And it has been fueled by knowledge of sea level changes and understanding their timing to put seashore sands way out beyond the current coastline, where, in the past, we would have expected to find nothing but deep ocean mud. In summary, this has worked, and worked with resounding success. I don’t know how much of this makes sense but it is as simple as I can make it and still keep this short. God bless!

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  • Sarah Van Baale I’m confused. Since none of us were here a million years ago, aren’t you using rocks to date the sea level changes? And then you’re using sea level dates to correspond with rock age? Why isn’t this circular reasoning?
    2 hrs · Like
  • Steve Ray Webb Sarah Van Baale, once again a topic I cannot answer in a few sentences, but in a nutshell there are multiple converging lines of evidence that reinforce and support each other. It all hangs nicely together. Perhaps you could start by reading the blogs that I wrote for GQ (see link) and then I could answer some questions from there. Blessings!
    http://blogos.org/scienceandtechnology/old-earth.php

    The Age of the Earth Part 1: Introduction
    How old is the earth? What does geology say? What are the spiritual implications of the young-earth/old-earth…
    BLOGOS.ORG
    2 hrs · Edited · Like · 1
  • Sarah Van Baale I did read them. Could you point me to where exactly where you explain why this isn’t circular reasoning? I don’t remember seeing it anywhere.
    2 hrs · Like
  • Steve Ray Webb Sarah Van Baale, let’s assume for the sake of argument that what I said was true. What evidence would you expect to see if it is? I think you would expect to see sedimentation rates, erosional rates, movement of tectonic plates, mountain building rates, etc. making sense with respect to each other and with respect to radiometric age dating (of which there are multiple types that cross-check each other and have been calibrated against tree-rings over 10,000 years back). And in turn they make sense with astronomical changes that affect the Earth. What kind of evidence would you want to see, from a realistic standpoint, that I am not providing you? What physical evidence do you have that the Earth is only 6000 years old? The fact is that these evidences do make sense whereas they would not make sense if crammed into 6000 years. Not easy to explain but absolutely true. But more to the point, and much more important, is that this does not contradict the Bible in any respect, as you will recall from my blogs.
    2 hrs · Edited · Like
  • Sarah Van Baale Actually, Steve, I’m not arguing the age of the earth. That argument is very simple – you either believe decay rates are constant or you don’t. I don’t think they are constant, you do. You’re posting your scientific work on a Bible based support site, but you don’t want to engage in a scientific discussion. My question has nothing to do with age. I’m asking why what you posted isn’t circular reasoning. If you are using radiometric dating methods to find the age of rocks, and then the age of rocks and their formations to determine sea levels, and then pointing to sea levels as further evidence of actual age, how is that not circular reasoning?

    (Furthermore, we don’t even need to discuss age if we just refer to it as nuclear decay. Because all the labs do is take a few samples, measure them, take their average and attach an age to it, right? We wouldn’t really need a fossil record to confirm age if decay rates are constant. Your work doesn’t prove an old earth. However, it may prove that certain decay rates align with certain properties/characteristics beneath the earth’s surface.)

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