304 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1944 
north latitude, on the lower Mackenzie River, in northwestern Canada, 
a major oil field has recently been developed. On the islands north of 
the mainland of western Canada seepages of petroleum from the rocks 
at the surface were noted by Stefansson during his Arctic explorations. 
At numerous localities marked by surface escapes of petroleum and 
natural gas along the Arctic coast of Siberia, over a distance of 3,000 
miles, Russian engineers have been engaged for years exploring for 
and producing petroleum. 
The geological character of the Arctic region and the evidences of 
petroleum in the rocks that make up the coasts of the Arctic Sea both 
justify the belief that this region will eventually prove to contain some 
of the important petroleum resources of the earth. 
As long ago as 1888 Edward Orton, a distinguished geologist en- 
gaged in a study of the petroleum resources of the State of Ohio 
observed: “It is obvious that the total amount of petroleum in the 
rocks underlying the surface * * * is large beyond computa- 
tion.” Since Orton’s time we have extended our exploration for pe- 
troleum much more widely over the earth and, although we have not 
as yet even begun to exhaust the possibilities, we have already learned 
much to substantiate his conviction that the total amount of petroleum 
in the rocks underlying the surface “is large beyond computation.” 
Nevertheless the belief persists that our petroleum resources are on 
the verge of exhaustion. Even though we have been obliged repeat- 
edly to revise upward our previous estimates of their probable volume, 
we still fear imminent shortages of petroleum products. Will nothing 
we have learned serve to dispel this extreme pessimism ? 
Petroleum and coal, our mineral fuels, are fossil sunlight of 2,000 
million years of earth history. In our natural resources of coal there 
is preserved for us part of the energy of the light which has bathed 
the land; in petroleum we recapture some of the energy of the sunlight 
which fell upon the adjacent waters. The coal resources of the earth 
we have measured, and we can calculate their volume with reasonable 
accuracy, a minimum quantity which runs into thousands of billions 
of tons—7,500 billion long tons. But the petroleum resources of the 
earth, which we cannot as yet measure, we refuse to think of as more 
than a few tens of billions of tons—less than one-third of 1 percent of 
our proved coal resources. Why do we believe there is so much less 
petroleum than coal in the earth? Was the life in the old seas so much 
less abundant than that on the land ? 
In recent years Parker Trask and others have made extensive inves- 
tigations of the sedimentary rocks of the earth. We know that of the 
present land surface, some 60 million square miles, more than one-third 
is composed of sedimentary rocks; that is to say, an area of 22 million 
square miles of the present land surface of the earth has been covered 
