Oil and water do mix

PROVO — Summer vacation is a bit like an Indiana Jones adventure for some Brigham Young University geology students — they visit exotic places and search for buried treasure.

Take Anne Dangerfield, a senior from Green Bay, Wis., for example.

Last year, she was a dinosaur detective searching for fossils in a quarry at Dinosaur National Monument. If a dusty quarry near Vernal doesn't sound exotic, her two field trips this summer certainly were.

First, she went with 25 other students to Florida and the Bahamas, where they swam with professors through waters that someday could contain rich oil fields. The insights they gleaned could help them land lucrative jobs exploring for oil for some of the world's largest companies.

And this week, Dangerfield is swimming and hiking in Hawaii for a volcanism- and ore-deposits class. "It's mostly hiking around Kilauea," she says, nonchalantly.

Kilauea is an active, erupting volcano.

Dangerfield plans to pursue a master's degree, and if she decides to work in the oil and gas industry, she might find personal treasure, too, because of the demand for experts who can find new oil fields.

"Our students going into oil and gas right now are getting nearly $70,000 to start, plus they'll sometimes get a $5,000 or $6,000 signing bonus with a master's degree," geology professor Tom Morris said.

They should be helped by what they saw on this summer's trip to the Florida Keys and off Andros Island in the Bahamas.

Oil is formed when creatures die and create organic-rich sediment that over centuries is buried to a depth of 8,000 to 10,000 feet, Morris said. There, it is heated until it generates crude oil, which migrates from what has become organic-rich rock into reservoir-quality rocks like the reef systems studied by the BYU students.

Nearly 50 percent of the world's oil and gas reserves come from underground reservoirs formed in what are called carbonate, or limestone, rocks. The field trip was designed in three parts to allow the students to visualize how the rocks are formed and how they become oil reservoirs.

"You can teach a class, but if you spend a good eight days like we did and really internalize and study the things we show the students, they really have a great concept of carbonate sedimentation," Morris said.

The group first observed panels of fossils from an ancient ocean reef unearthed in an old limestone quarry at Florida's Windley Key Fossil Reef Geological State Park. That experience prepared them for the next day's swim over a living reef.

"We go look at the modern to understand the ancient, the rock record," Morris said.