Estimated location of the seafloor sources of marine natural oil seeps from sea surface outbreaks: A new "source path procedure" applied to the northern Gulf of Mexico

Abstract

Marine oil reservoirs are generally characterized on the sea surface by the presence of natural oil seeps (Sea Surface outbreaks - hereafter SSO). The latter are easily evidenced with Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images because of the dampening effect that oil has on the capillary and associated small gravity waves (Bragg waves). The sea surface outbreaks of oil seeps are offset from their source on the seabed (seafloor sources - SFS) by hundreds meters or even kilometres. This displacement all along the sea water column is a function of the upward velocity of the oil droplet size, and the presence of lateral marine currents. This paper proposes a Vertical Drift Model (VDM) that combines both SAR images to get the SSO and the hydrodynamic model (HYCOM) function of the oil droplet size to estimate the SFS. After oil seeps detection from SAR images, the VDM proceeds to a regression in time and space based on the upward velocity of the oil, based on Stokes law, and the hydrodynamic conditions (HYCOM) to estimate the location of the seep source on the seafloor. The upward velocity depends strongly on the unknown droplet size. We propose herein a new VDM method named "sources paths" that allows to estimate the oil seeps sources on the seafloor without a priori knowledge of the oil droplet size by finding, for each oil seep, the seafloor sources corresponding to different diameters. We call "sources path" the line that joins the seafloor sources for an oil seep. The seafloor sources ought to be at the intersection of the maximum sources paths. The methodology has been applied to the northern Gulf of Mexico where the locations of many prolific oil seep sites are well known. A first validation of the source path procedure is that the obtained SFSs correspond to the seafloor sources of oil droplets having the same diameter and seeped at different times. Another validation has been performed through the comparison of SFS locations and those of the outcropping shallow salt. This comparison shows a good correlation and suggests that the oil seeps may be situated above the allochtonous toward autochthonous salt connections.