Pictures: Oil Potential and Animal Habitat in the Monterey Shale

California Condor’s Shaky Rebound

Photograph by Joel Sartore, National Geographic

Once found across much of North America, the California condor now inhabits only a few regions in Utah, Arizona, and California. The current range includes landscapes that sit atop the Monterey shale formation, where a potential fossil fuel bonanza has spurred interest in oil exploration and drilling beyond conventional oil fields.

Listed as endangered in 1967 and reduced to just nine individuals in the wild in 1985, the California condor remains one of the most endangered vertebrates. Fewer than 400 live today, but a $40 million recovery program in the works since 1980 has put them on the rebound.

These imposing scavengers soar steadily on wind currents as high as 15,000 feet (4,600 meters), their wings outstretched to spans approaching 10 feet (3 meters) tip to tip. In search of food, they may travel up to 150 miles in a day, descending into grassland and oak savanna foothills to forage for carrion. GPS tracking data of condors in the wild population inhabiting central and southern California shows individuals have ventured into areas around sites leased for oil exploration in Monterey County.

Risks for the condor amid oil and gas development are numerous, the Center for Biological Diversity warns. The birds have been known to spend time on oil pads and other equipment in southern California, and habitat fragmentation threatens to subdivide the population's already-small gene pool.

Published May 28, 2013

On the Precipice

Photograph Frans Lanting, Corbis

Waves lash at the cliffs in California's Monterey Bay, where rocky outcroppings of the Monterey formation are a feature of the jagged coastline.

The Monterey formation indeed owes much of its mineral richness to the sea. Covering much of western California, the formation was once part of the ocean floor in a region of intense upwelling, where life-sustaining nutrients are churned up from the water's depths to zones where sunlight could penetrate. Taking place during the Miocene epoch—about 18 million to 6 million years ago—this promoted the explosion of a group of plants called diatoms, explained Bob Garrison, professor emeritus of earth sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a leading expert on sedimentology whose work has focused primarily on paleo-oceanography.

"These diatoms flourished in these upwelling zones because they could take advantage of these nutrients," he said in an interview during a visit to one of the formation's rocky outcroppings. The diatoms and other forms of organic matter, he said, "settled to the seafloor, where it became buried, heated up, and converted to oil."

It was a violent path from there, geologically speaking, which makes for complicated oil recovery. "The geology is very complex," says Pete Stark, senior research director for the consulting firm IHS in Englewood, Colorado. "You have anywhere from two thousand to over ten thousand feet of rock that make up the Monterey group, and a very complex set of lithologies that are also in a very complex tectonic area that has been folded and faulted and heated and cooked and churned this way and that way." (See related gallery: "Pictures: Bakken Shale Oil Boom Transforms North Dakota.")

Published May 28, 2013

Kit Fox: Tiny Dog, Big Oil Find

Photograph by Kevin Schafer, National Geographic

The big-eared, bushy-tailed San Joaquin kit fox made its home in the grasslands and scrublands of the San Joaquin Valley, smack in the middle of western California, until about 1930.

Its numbers shrank as people began to convert the land to farming, orchards, and cities.

This tiniest of North American dogs, federally protected since 1967, dines on insects, rabbits, grasses, and rodents, and has established itself in the oil towns of Bakersfield, Taft, and Coalinga.

Even absent a new oil boom, kit foxes face a gauntlet of threats, said Cummings. "Right now, if you're a kit fox, unless you're one of the lucky few, you're already living in a fragmented habitat where, to get from your den to the areas where you feed, you have to cross roads. The food you find, you hope that it's not tainted by rodenticide and other toxins," he said. "Add to that a whole flurry of new roads and truck traffic and oil worker traffic, and the constant noise and drilling and land disturbance, and the kit fox will face an ever more dangerous spiderweb of roads."

Published May 28, 2013

Blunt-Nosed Leopard Lizard

Photograph by Marc Moritsch, National Geographic

The powerful hind legs of the endangered blunt-nosed leopard lizard, found only in California's San Joaquin Valley and nearby foothills, allow it to launch up to 60 centimeters in pursuit of unsuspecting bees and grasshoppers. When not feeding on insects, this spotted-and-striped lizard has been known to gobble up other lizards—including young of its own species—and just about anything else small enough to be overcome and swallowed.

Though it feeds opportunistically, the blunt-nosed leopard lizard is particular about its habitat, requiring sparsely vegetated, undeveloped areas. The Center for Biological Diversity and the Sierra Club named the species in their lawsuit as one that could be threatened by oil and gas development on public lands in Monterey and Fresno counties.

Since the 1870s, irrigated agriculture, petroleum development, transportation infrastructure, and other activities have eliminated most of the original natural communities in the San Joaquin Valley, ravaging the blunt-nosed leopard lizard population. The animals have been known to "recolonize" abandoned oil fields, but as oil activity increases, the populations decline.

Published May 28, 2013

Endangered Steelhead Trout

Photograph by Frans Lanting, National Geographic

The steelhead trout once swam abundantly in the Salinas River as the waterway carved its path through central California, past the San Ardo oil field, into the fertile Salinas Valley, and out into Monterey Bay. Flowing northward, the Salinas earned the nickname "upside-down river." It supplies irrigation water for the many farms of the "Salad Bowl of America," straining the trout's major migration corridor.

Annual runs of the population known as South-Central California Steelhead trout have dwindled to fewer than 500 returning adults, from an estimated 25,000. Environmental groups suing the Obama administration to prevent fracking on more than 17,000 acres of public land leased for oil and gas activities say developing the leases could make matters worse for the steelhead by affecting flows of the Salinas River and its tributaries, and opening the possibility for wastewater from the operations to contaminate nearby streams.

Published May 28, 2013

Next: Animals That Blocked the Keystone XL Pipeline Path

Photograph by Joel Sartore

Published May 28, 2013