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Alaska geologist Tom Marshall dies
Kristen Nelson Petroleum News
Tom Marshall, a pivotal figure in the state’s resource development, died Feb. 19 in Anchorage at 94, according to an obituary published in the Anchorage Daily News.
Marshall, a geologist, was responsible for the state’s selection of lands at Prudhoe Bay.
He came to Alaska from Wyoming in 1958 to homestead on federal lands, eager to get in on the ground floor of the Cook Inlet oil exploration boom touched off by the Swanson River discover in 1957.
“I also wanted to see if Alaska was the magnificent place that my grandfather Marshall said it was,” he told members of the Alaska Geological Society in April 2008. The elder Marshall had traveled to Alaska decades earlier as a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Marshall, who has a degree in geology from the University of Colorado, took a position as an assistant lands selection officer with the young state of Alaska government to support himself while homesteading.
He was tasked with evaluating a federal opening for land selection on the North Slope. He said his primary source of information was information about the Navy’s exploration program on the North Slope in the 1940s and 1950s in professional papers published by the U.S. Geological Survey.
Promoted to state land selection officer, Marshall enthusiastically recommended the swampy land-covered area on the North Slope between what is now the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
The area between NPR-A and ANWR, a swampy, lake-covered area, contained no surface rock exposures, but Marshall saw general geological similarities with the petroleum-bearing areas in the Rocky Mountains.
The state Division of Lands polled seven companies and none of them recommended the Prudhoe Bay area for leasing, preferring the Colville basin west of Prudhoe Bay.
But Alaska Natural Resources Commissioner Phil Holdsworth and state lands director Roscoe Bell had faith in Marshall’s judgment and the lands he recommended, including Prudhoe Bay, were selected.
In December 1964 the state offered what it described as Prudhoe West (Kuparuk) acreage as part of a mixed competitive oil and gas lease sale which included Southcentral acreage. Its first exclusively North Slope competitive sale was in July 1965. Richfield Oil, soon to become ARCO, picked up more than 71,500 acres covering the crest of a subsurface geological structure on the shores of Prudhoe Bay while BP acquired nearly 82,000 acres lower down the flank of the Prudhoe Bay structure.
Nearly three years later ARCO announced discovery and confirmation of the Prudhoe Bay oil and gas field, and what some had called “Marshall’s folly” changed the course of the state’s history.
Marshall looking at Lisburne Marshall, who retired from the state as chief petroleum geologist for the Division of Oil and Gas in 1978, said, “I don’t want to sound too smart about the discovery, because frankly, I was dead wrong. I had read reports about the Sadlerochit sandstone and the Ivishik formation. They were described as being primarily quartzite, which has to be zero porosity. I couldn’t see outcrops of these Ivishak sands in the information I had about the region across the broad Slope, and it didn’t seem to impress the USGS geologists who studied them in the Foothills area.
“But as we know, the Prudhoe Bay discovery was primarily in the Ivishak sands of the Sadlerochit formation, which I did not even consider. I thought it was going to be the Lisburne. Fortunately, it’s both of them. But the Lisburne is a far distant third or fourth largest reservoir on the North Slope,” he said in 2008.
Marshall said he noticed the 2,000- to 2,500-foot Lisburne Limestone over a broad area with all sorts of porosity.
“It excited me because back in Wyoming, we had the geologic equivalent of the Lisburne Limestone in our Madison Limestone, which had been in many areas of Wyoming, including Casper where I lived for many years.”
The Lisburne was at 20,000 feet in the Colville Trough, he said.
“This was definitely considered an uneconomic depth,” Marshall said. “But regional geology to me means there would be a rise from the Colville Trough up to the Barrow Canyon Arch on the Beaufort Sea shore. It would be a terrific gathering area for petroleum and maybe there would be a big oil field there.”
Significant role John Sweet, Alaska district explorationist for ARCO at the time of the 1968 discovery, said “Tom Marshall deserves a monument for persisting in getting the state to select the acreage where the discovery of Prudhoe Bay was made. He fought tooth and nail from his appointment … until he convinced the governor in 1963 to make the selection on the North Slope.”
His obituary lists no statue, but in 1982 he was presented with the Distinguished Service Award by the University of Alaska Fairbanks School of Mineral Industry, was formally recognized by the Alaska Legislature in 1997 for his contributions to the state and in May 2015 received an Honorary Doctorate of Science Degree for his state contributions from UAF.
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