The JOIDES program has demonstrated the technical feasibility of drilling in the deep ocean. However, except for petroleum shows in the Sigsbee Knolls in the Gulf of Mexico, there is no firm evidence of petroleum reservoirs in the deep ocean beyond the limits of the continental slope to require economic use of such technology.

Emery suggested the possibility of vast petroleum resources in deep water adjacent to the continents in the areas of hemipelagic sedimentation. One such area adjacent to the United States is the continental rise off California between Point Conception and Cape Mendocino, which covers 200,000 sq km and consists of three major submarine fans, the Arguello, Monterey, and Delgada, at depths of about 3,000 m to 4,500 m.

The fans are composed of continental debris carried down submarine canyons and deposited on the fan through a system of branching and meandering submarine

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channels. During the depositional growth of the fan, the active channelway shifted periodically, producing abandoned channels. The coarser sediment naturally confined to the channel became covered, after abandonment, by finer grained material. The interchannel deposits, composed chiefly of green hemipelagic muds, are potential petroleum source beds because of their significant carbon content. Thus abandoned channels after sufficient burial and invasion from source beds make excellent stratigraphic traps, especially near the mouth of tributary submarine canyons where the grain size would be larger and the channel width and depth greater.

Off central California, potential stratigraphic traps would be seaward of the mouths of the Arguello, Sur-Partington-Lucia, Monterey-Carmel, Ascension, Pioneer, Farallon, Bodega, and Delgada canyons as shown by subbottom profiling. The proximity of such potential reserves to the United States makes buried channels on large-scale deep-sea fans particularly attractive prospects similar to prospects in turbidite basins of the California borderland.

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