Publications

Amplified Geochemical Imaging technology (Anderson, 2006) was utilized to geochemically sample shallow sea bottom cores for the presence of hydrocarbons at nanogram (10-9) levels. To date, this technology has been tested and successfully used on fresh core material (Abrams and Dahdah, 2011), but it had not been attempted on archived material. To that end, an extensive archive of ocean seabed core samples existed for the east coast of Canada, collected over a period from 1965 to the present. The cores are stored at the Geological Survey of Canada at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. 170 cores were selected by Nalcor Energy Oil and Gas as a pilot program to perform geochemical sampling from selected areas off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. The objective was to determine if there are indications of petroleum hydrocarbons on any of the cores. The cores selected for study were selected from sealed and refrigerated material collected over the last 11 years on the assumption that these were the most likely cores to retain significant geochemical signatures. Results from this pilot study are encouraging, prompting Nalcor Energy Oil and Gas to expand the study into other areas, and investigate the use of older core material.