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Alaska scientist making his mark at USGS Resignation from DNR's Division of Oil and Gas proved fortuitous for Mark Myers, who is now director of a national agency Sarah Hurst For Petroleum News
What a difference a year makes. Mark Myers couldn’t have been more accurate in using those words to describe his dramatic shift in fortunes since he resigned as head of Alaska’s Division of Oil and Gas in October 2005. Just over six months later, President George Bush announced his nomination of Myers as director of the U.S. Geological Survey. In mid-September he was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate. On Nov. 8 this year he addressed the Alaska Miners Association’s annual convention by videoconference and gave an interview to Petroleum News.
Myers was one of six top officials who resigned from Alaska’s Department of Natural Resources after Gov. Frank Murkowski announced he was firing the commissioner, Tom Irwin. Irwin had written a memo saying the governor was giving up too much in the gas pipeline negotiations with the major oil companies. The Alaska legislature agreed, and apparently so did the people of the state, who gave Murkowski only 19 percent of the vote in the Republican primary and elected Sarah Palin as their new governor.
Last year, after submitting his notice of resignation, Myers was excited about attending the miners’ convention and meeting the then-director of USGS, Charles Groat. But the new DNR commissioner, Michael Menge, told him that he couldn’t go there and represent the department, because he had resigned. Myers was disappointed and subsequently disappointed again when he had the opportunity to meet constantly with the new USGS director — himself — for six weeks, as he put it humorously. “I just expected him to be a little smarter,” he said.
UAF doctorate Myers was smart enough to obtain a doctorate from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, specializing in sedimentology, clastic depositional environments, surface and subsurface sequence analysis and sandstone petrography. He went on to serve as senior staff geologist for exploration at ARCO Alaska and Phillips Alaska, and survey chief for field programs in the Mackenzie Delta, Cook Inlet and North Slope. Illustrating his talk at the miners’ convention with a slide that showed Alaska superimposed on a map of the Lower 48, occupying one-fifth of the rest of the country, Myers made the point that his experience in Alaska was excellent preparation for running the national agency.
State and local entities in Alaska can expect to benefit from their already-existing ties with the new USGS director. “Alaska has a very special place in my heart and I’m looking forward to our continued presence,” Myers said. He repeatedly emphasized that collaboration is crucial to the agency’s work. The functions of USGS are wide-ranging, as the nation’s largest water, earth and biological science and civilian mapping agency, with over 9,000 employees and 400 offices.
Some of the projects that require continued cooperation between USGS and Alaska entities include digital geological mapping and regional mineral assessments. For example, Myers noted that USGS has an agreement with the Bristol Bay Native Corporation to assess the mineral resources in southwest Alaska. The state’s Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys receives matching federal funds for geologic mapping, and has made much of its work public at the website alaska.usgs.gov, which Myers singled out for high praise.
“One of the first and foremost responsibilities we have is to work in cooperation and partnership with the state agencies and other federal agencies,” Myers said. “We want to make sure that we can do the science, where it’s appropriate, where it will help answer the long-term, difficult questions, and where it can be effective on the landscape. We need to be able to do that science without advocacy, and that’s an important part; the science has to be unbiased.”
Myers: Bristol Bay area has very high potential If Myers had to choose new, undeveloped areas of Alaska to open to oil and gas exploration, other than the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or the Chukchi Sea, his first picks would be the Alaska Peninsula or the Bristol Bay area (also referred to as the North Aleutian Basin), he told Petroleum News. The Bristol Bay area has very high potential for natural gas on both state and federal lands, Myers believes. “There hasn’t been a modern assessment of the area,” he said. “But all the four elements appear to be there and there’s good oil shows as well as gas shows in many of the wells that were drilled there in the early 1900s on.” The last well was the Becharof State No. 1 well, drilled by Amoco in the mid-1980s.
The four elements that Myers referred to are: a source rock rich in organic material buried deep enough for subterranean heat to cook it into oil; porous and permeable reservoir rock that can act as a storage device for the hydrocarbons that migrate from the source rock; a cap rock (seal) that prevents it from escaping to the surface; and a trapping mechanism.
Goal: integration of agency’s work As he starts out in the job of director, which he calls “a position of great honor,” Myers’ priority is to understand how USGS works and to try and integrate its work, since historically it has been vertically structured. “With USGS you have a very, very broad organization with a lot of very, very smart people,” he said. “You have to figure out how to ensure the information within the organization flows across from discipline to discipline, and up and down the science structure. It will take communication and forward planning.”
If this goal can be achieved, USGS could play a vital role in the study of issues like climate change, which can be looked at holistically by the agency, Myers thinks. “We can look at the geologic record, at historical climate change that’s not human-induced,” he said. “We can look at the time-scale of it. We can look at the severity of it. We can look at the drivers, and potentially understand what changed those conditions.
“Then we can overlay it with modern environmental work to see what are good indicator species of the effects of climate change, and what’s happening on the ground, along with the cell work, along with the amount of carbon in the system that might get released,” Myers continued. “And then the biological response to it in terms of animals; and the water response to it — the ground water flow, the changes in groundwater temperature, the geochemistry. So we can bring all that to the table on an issue in a way that no other scientific agency in the country can. We have historically worked topically on biological and geological issues separately so bringing those together allows for an integration of science that’s really very powerful.”
When the Bureau of Land Management or the Department of the Interior is trying to make a land-use decision, USGS will have to be ready to assist, Myers said. “You have to have a lot of science done in front of it to help answer the questions, so you have to anticipate what the questions will be at least five years out there — and have enough of the right kind of science, so you can bring value to the answers you provide. The forward-planning element is a big part of my job, particularly in getting funding for it. It’s a real challenge.”
—Kay Cashman contributed to this article.
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