Abstract
ABSTRACT The oil industry has crucially contributed to advance the geological knowledge of marine regions by employing technological, logistical, and economic resources unattainable in academic research. However, oil exploration projects are framed by confidentiality contracts that hinder the free dissemination of data and results to the geologists’ community: for information to flow, the secrecy regime needs to become permeable. From the onset of the Western Mediterranean’s exploration in the late 1960s, the oil industry encouraged a growing dissemination of information, during which oil experts established formal paths of data diffusion, exchange, and collaboration with academic geologists. What prompted the oil industry’s secrecy regime to become more flexible to data spillovers? As I argue, two scientific events: the acceptance of plate tectonics theory as a new geological framework through which geological evidence needed to be reinterpreted, and the existence of salt domes buried in the deep Mediterranean basin, which indicated the region’s oil potential. The Mediterranean seafloor moved, in little over a decade, from being an overlooked region to emerge (after joint projects, discussions, and exchanges) as a co-construction between academic geologists and oil industry experts.
Published Version
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