Seeps
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Seeps".

For other uses of "seep" see Seep (disambiguation)

A petroleum seep is a place where liquid or gaseous hydrocarbons escape to the surface through fractures and fissures in the rock and between geological layers. Petroleum seeps are quite common: California has thousands of them. Much of the petroleum discovered in California during the 19th century was from observations of seeps.¹

Petroleum seeps may be a significant source of pollution.

Coal Oil Point seep field

One seep, the Coal Oil Point Seep Field offshore from Santa Barbara, California has a seep area of about three square kilometers, and releases about 40 tons per day of methane and about 19 tons of reactive organic gas (ethane, propane, butane and higher hydrocarbons), which is about the same as that released by all the cars and trucks in the county^{citation needed} . The liquid petroleum produces a slick that is many kilometers long and when degraded by evaporation and weathering, produces tar balls which wash up on the beaches for miles around.²

This seep also releases on the order of 100 to 150 barrels of liquid petroleum per day. The field produces about 9 cubic meters of natural gas per barrel of petroleum.²

See also

• Tar pit

References

• Hornafius, J.S.Quigley, D.C., and Luyendyk, B.P. "The world's most spectacular marine hydrocarbon seeps (Coal Oil Point, Santa Barbara Channel, California): Quantification of Emissions", Journal of Geophysical Research, v.104, n. C9, pp. 20,703-20,711, September 15, 1999. [1]

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