President Truman's executive proclamation of September 25, 1945, declaring the continental shelf contiguous to our coasts to be subject to our jurisdiction and control, fell upon the ears of a petroleum industry which in its worldwide search for new sources of supply, had already found its exploratory operations on more than one continent brought to a stop at the land's edge across which it had for years peered uncertainly out to sea. The problem of petroleum resources on the continental shelf challenges first the geologist, then the engineer. The geologist's immediate and pressing responsibility is to review his accumulated knowledge of the character of the continental shelf, and in the light of his concepts of the origin and occurrence of petroleum, to measure the adequ cy of the reward which awaits the conquest of petroleum under the submerged margins of the continents to compensate the risk, effort, and expense which this task poses for the engineer. In reply to this challenge to geologists, it is submitted that if the earth is viewed as a functioning organism, surely one of its normal functions since life covered its surface has been the generation of petroleum, much greater volumes of petroleum than are now believed to exist beneath the land areas of the earth should have been formed through the ages. The most likely place to search for these possible additional stores of petroleum is the continental shelf.

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