Seafloor Ooze, Subduction, and Oil

When I was a young man, I thought that having my PhD meant that I was now a scientist, that the advanced academic degree was somehow the dividing line between scientist and not-scientist. If I had been a little better at history, I would have realized that some of the greatest minds in science – people like Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell – did not have PhDs. What they DID have was a tendency to think about things. The following two queries came from someone I call Patrick the Plumber Scientist.

Q: I've read the seafloor  "ooze" contains a fair amount of carbon based material. When this ooze is carried along with the seafloor downward in subduction zones wouldn't the combination of heat and pressure along with the presence of water form hydrocarbons aka oil?

- Patrick D

A: You are an unusually thoughtful person to arrive at that conclusion. Not all the ooze, as you call it, actually goes down with the subducting oceanic crustal slab – some of it gets scraped off and in some cases rafted onto a continental margin. You can find some of these strange remnants on the northern California and southwestern Oregon coastal area, among many other places in the rest of the world.

At some point the carbon from the seafloor muck that DOES go down with the oceanic crust probably passes through an oil/hydrocarbon maturation phase, but at depths and circumstances where it could not be economically extracted (even if it could be located). The muck continues down even deeper with the oceanic crustal slab to depths where even greater heat and pressure subsequently break it down to even more primitive constituents. With the water and sulfur also found in these seafloor sediments, this leads to partial melting – the lighter constituents rise through the crust (like a lava-lamp), somewhere in-board of the subduction zone to form volcanic chains like the Cascades, the Kamchatka Peninsula, the Andes, the Indonesian Archipelago, etc.

The magma that actually rises is driven at least partly by CO₂ and H₂S gases that derive from that original seafloor muck and seawater. These constituents, along with the iron, manganese, and silica of the Mantle, comprise the rising magma.  As it comes closer to the surface of the Earth, the pressure decreases and the gases come out of solution (like uncapping a bottle of soda) in that rising magma to form bubbles. This has been studied in one of our laboratories in a hot-high-pressure cell. The increasing nucleation of bubbles expands the magma volume and this causes the whole mix to accelerate upward faster and faster toward the surface. There it can often reach a runaway explosion that we call a Plinian eruption (named after Pliny the Elder, who died at Herculaneum trying to rescue friends during the eruption of Mt Vesuvius). This bubble-filled magma becomes a froth exploding violently upward into the atmosphere; it cools in the air to form the ash and tephra that (along with effusive lava) form the slopes of stratocone volcanoes like Mt Fuji, Mt Hood, and Mount St Helens.

Volcanologists work hard to measure and track volcanogenic H₂S (the burnt-match smell) and CO₂ gases to get a sense of where a restive volcano is in its possibly-pending, probably-not eruption. When Mount St Helens erupted in 2004-2006, it was relatively non-violent (though you would have died if you had been inside the crater at the time). An earlier almost-eruption in 1998 never quite reached the surface. Seismologists could see the volcanic conduit below MSH "light up" with the rock-breaking activity of a magma approaching the surface, but it never broke through. In the intervening 6 years, apparently these gases largely escaped, reducing the explosive danger from the volcano when it finally did erupt on October 1, 2004. One way to know if the CO₂ is volcanogenic, or from the modern atmosphere, is to measure its isotopic makeup. Atmospheric CO₂ has ¹⁴C ("Carbon-14"), ¹³C, and ¹²C isotopes. Volcanogenic CO₂ has only Carbon-12 (¹²C), the stable isotope in it. The other two radio-isotopes have long since decayed during the millions of years passed while the carbon was deep inside the Earth. 

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