Earthquake Storms by John Dvorak

Author:John Dvorak
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2014-01-03T05:00:00+00:00

Thomas Wilson Dibblee Jr. was the quintessential Californian. His mother, Anita Orena, was a great-granddaughter of Captain José Antonio De la Guerra y Noriega, who in the early 1800s was appointed by the Mexican government to be the commandante of the Presidio at Santa Barbara. Dibblee’s father traced his family’s New World ancestry to Ebenezer Dibblee, an Englishman who immigrated to Massachusetts in 1635 and whose descendants continued west and arrived in California with other gold seekers in 1859.

Young Thomas Dibblee spent his childhood on a 20,000-acre ranch, Rancho San Julian, part of an original Mexican land grant located northwest of Santa Barbara at the foot of the Santa Ynez Mountains. At age 18, during his final year of high school, he was sent by his father out across the ranch with a consulting geologist—who, as chance would have it, had been educated by Lawson at Berkeley—to assess the potential for oil. No oil was found, but from the experience Dibblee began a lifelong interest in fossil collecting and gained an immediate appreciation for what could be learned by seeing how rocks are situated and how they are layered.

In 1936, Dibblee graduated from Stanford University—taught, in part, by Bailey Willis—with a doctoral degree in geology and paleontology. He worked for a short time for the state of California inventorying mercury deposits but, bored with a desk job, soon found work preparing geologic maps that could be used to search for oil.

The company that hired him was the Richfield Oil Company of California. Formed in 1905, during its first three decades of existence Richfield went through several bankruptcies and court-ordered reorganizations and mergers with other failed oil companies. In the 1940s, it was still struggling to find a major oil reservoir—most of the reservoirs then in production in California were under the control of a few big oil companies such as Standard Oil or Union—and the executives of Richfield decided they would find one by searching for it in a radically different way. First, the Richfield executives hired a cadre of recent college graduates such as Dibblee. Then they ordered the graduates to look for oil where no one had yet found it—in the vast region centered among the major known fields and cut through by the San Andreas Fault.

In this region of the Coast Ranges—the mass of mountains that parallel the coast of southern Oregon and northern California as far south as Santa Barbara—are a number of elongated basins that seem ripe for oil prospecting. Each basin had been explored by the big oil companies and several exploratory wells had been drilled, but no one had ever been able to find an oil reservoir and establish a producing well. That fact led many to believe that, somehow, the San Andreas Fault had prevented the accumulation of oil. Nevertheless, with few other alternatives, executives of the Richfield Oil Company directed its college-trained men to search in this region. And so Thomas Dibblee went out to see what he could find.

His method of doing fieldwork still makes other geologists cringe.

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