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DeliciousSanta Barbara (global-adventures.us): A group of football field sized asphalt domes have been discovered in the Pacific Ocean, 10 miles offshore from Santa Barbara, California. 35,000 years ago, undersea volcanoes deposited massive flows of petroleum on the ocean floor that later formed the domes, scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institutions (WHOI) say.
"It was an amazing experience, driving along…and all of a sudden, this mountain is staring you in the face," said Christopher M. Reddy, director of WHOI’s Coastal Ocean Institute and one of the study's senior authors, as he 
described the discovery of the domes using the deep submersible vehicle Alvin. Moreover, the dome was teeming with undersea life. "It was essentially an oasis," he said in a press release, "almost like an artificial reef."
The chemical composition of the up to six story high domes that emerge from the ocean floor to a depth of 700 feet is very unusual, according to Reddy. "There aren’t that many opportunities to study oil that's been sitting around on the bottom of the ocean for 35,000 years." The substance is very weathered, so the scientist. "That means nature had taken away a lot of compounds. These mounds of black material were the last remnants of oil that exploded up from below. To see nature doing this on its own was an unbelievable finding."
Reddy estimates that the dome structures contain about 100,000 tons of residual asphalt and compares them to an underwater version of the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, complete with the fossils of ancient animals.
The researchers are not sure exactly why sea life has taken up residence around the asphalt domes, but one possibility is that because the oil has become benign over the centuries that some creatures are able to actually feed off it and get energy from it. They may also be "thriving" on tiny holes in the dome areas that release minute amounts of methane gas.
The scientists plan to continue studying the domed structures. "We have some very fundamental questions that remain," says David Valentine, lead author of the National Science Foundation-funded study. "It would be nice to know what is going on deep down under these things. One future direction is to try and actually drill into them," he says. "We also need to turn it over to some geologists to figure out where this oil is really coming from. More fundamentally, we're going to look at the actual degradation of the oil by microorganisms and maybe even see what organisms are trapped in this…very much like the La Brea Tar Pits."
Illustration: Jack Cook, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
