Oil Exploration Under the Catastrophist Paradigm

Phanerozoic Large Igneous Province, Petroleum System, and Source Rock Links

“…Several continental rifted (passive) margins that are the focus of recent hydrocarbon exploration (e.g., Gulf of Mexico, and Arctic, South Atlantic, and West Indian Oceans), also have experienced LIP interactions during their histories, so understanding their distribution and evolution is fundamental to hydrocarbon exploration (see section 16.7 in Ernst, 2014, and references therein). A spatial correlation between 90% of giant oil fields and LIPs being distributed within two great circles was noted by Wilson et al (2002), who speculated they were related to the locations of the three largest meteorite impacts on Earth; note this hypothesis remains to be validated. Over a dozen LIPs have been recognized to have formed during the Phanerozoic, each of which coincided with significant biological extinctions and deposition of world-class hydrocarbon source rocks (HSRs: see definition in section 9.2.1; Larson, 1991).…”