What's Oil Doing in Signal Hill, Long Beach, California?

It takes complicated geology to give you oil - and California has plenty of both. Southern California routinely suffers through earthquakes, an indication that strong geologic forces are currently at work in this part of the world. The San Andreas Fault stretches for hundreds of kilometers along the California coast, a result of pieces of the earth's crust sliding past one another. But these sections of crust (known as "plates") weren't always sliding past one another. Several millions of years ago, these plates were involved in a head-on collision. This collision caused the rocks to fold, bend and break. As we'll see in a moment, folded, bent and broken rocks often are the best places to look for lots of oil

At left: A simplified diagram of some of the major oilfields in Southern California. The red lines indicate where there are faults. It's no coincidence that the faults line up with many of the large oil fields. As a matter of fact, in some cases, the faults are the REASON there are oil fields here.

...continue learning about the geology of Signal Hill click here to learn about the history of oil at Signal Hill
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Shaded Relief Map

Most of California's natural oil and gas seeps are in the area circled in white on this shaded relief map. The state's major underground oil and gas fields (known from drilled wells) are in the three areas outlined in yellow. Note that the seeps occur near the oil and gas oil fields. This is no coincidence. The reason seeps are found close to major oil and gas fields is that most seeps are fed by these natural underground reservoirs. Just as springs are fed by underground reservoirs of water, oil and gas seeps are fed by underground reservoirs of oil and gas.

The low area, colored dark green, is the Central Valley, California's famous agricultural belt. It is underlain by sedimentary rocks that are rich in petroleum and is home to the state's largest oil and gas fields. Oil and gas migrate upward from these underground fields to form the adjacent oil and gas seeps. Click on the "Seeps Index" button or the "Fields Index" button to view a more detailed map of seeps

In this map of the Bay Area, fault lines are shown in black, earthquakes in red, and seismic stations in blue.