If you spend any time at all on the beaches of Goleta, you know what tar is. Some days it’s plentiful, other days there isn’t any. Surprisingly, a lot of people don’t understand why it’s there.
Lots of folks assume it’s due to the big oil rigs out in the channel, leaking excess oil. But the reality is, tar has been on our beaches for thousands of years and archaeologists have found signs of human use of tar and oil.
Chumash Native Americans began building plank canoes called “tomol” and caulked them with boiled tar and pine pitch around 500 AD. Soon they began preparing tar as a traded commodity and it made the coastal Chumash quite wealthy, compared to other tribes.
Woven water bottles were caulked with tar to make them waterproof. Women wadded up tar and used it as weights to hold down the bottoms of their grass skirts. Tar was used as a coating for sewing strings and fishing spears and in the construction of pipes and whistles. It was also used to cement fractures in broken bowls and vessels.
You can see a good example of a tomol at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History and the tar filling the cracks.
On Oct. 16, 1542, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo sailed into the Santa Barbara Channel and noted that the natives were using the asphaltum as canoe caulk. He even used some of the tar to caulk his own ships. In later years, the Spanish missionaries would use the tar to seal the aqueducts for their water system. In 1792, Captain Cook’s famous navigator, George Vancouver, reported that the ocean near Goleta was covered with an oily surface in all directions. According to Vancouver, the oil was so thick that the entire sea took on an iridescent hue and he mentioned the “strong smell of tar”. Many other explorers reported similar sightings.
In the 1850s, T. Wallace More started selling the tar from his newly acquired 400 acre ranch in eastern Goleta that we call More Mesa today. That area is still known for its natural tar deposits on the beach and in the cliffs, naturally seeping from the below the mesa. The demand for his tar was so great, More built a pier to transport his product more quickly and effectively.
Due to the geological makeup of the area, tarpits were fairly common on the bluffs around Goleta, and soon a second asphalt mine was opened on the bluff above Goleta Point. This one was far more productive and by the late 1800s, asphalt mining became Goleta’s biggest industry. But with changing technologies, asphalt would soon by eclipsed by another product that was abundant here.
Black gold. Drilling for oil in Goleta exploded onto the local scene in 1928, when the Barnsdall and Rio Grande oil companies discovered the Ellwood Oil Field. The crude oil was produced from wells on the bluffs, but soon technological advances allowed men to drill from piers that were built out into the ocean. For several decades, the beautifully serene Goleta coastline was transformed into a loud and ugly industrial zone.
Oil tanks and processing plants appeared on coastal ranches all the way up the Gaviota Coast. These massive oil tanks were constructed in 1929 and they sat just west of Coal Oil Point until being removed in 2024.
While the Ellwood Oil Field was discovered in the late 1920s, it wasn’t until the mid-1940s that scientists began studying the intense offshore oil and gas seepage zone near Goleta. Spanning an area three miles long and one mile wide, the seep exhibits all the characteristics usually associated with a major underground oil deposit. Numerous oil and gas seeps are located along the entire coast of Santa Barbara County and Northern Ventura County.
There have been more than 1,200 natural seeps charted in the Santa Barbara Channel. Half of these occur within three miles of Coal Oil Point.
According to the NOAA website, natural seeps in Southern California contribute about 5 million gallons of oil to the ocean annually. However, in the Coal Oil Point area alone, seep estimates range from 4,200 to 25,000 gallons of oil per day, or 1.5 to 9 million gallons annually. (Leifer et al. 2005)
The seeps produce a persistent oil slick that’s usually carried north and west by ocean currents. As the oil rises to the surface and floats, it coagulates and biodegrades into tar.
The most heavily impacted beaches are those between Campus Point and El Capitan Beach, although wind and currents sometimes take the oil slick onto Santa Barbara city beaches and as far away as Los Angeles. The amount of tar that ends up on the beach also depends on wave activity, since high surf conditions tend to break up the oil slick and prevent it from reaching the beaches in larger chunks.
Thus more tar in the summer, when the surf is calmer and there are more feet on the beach!
Probably the reason most folks today are quick to blame the oil rigs for the tar are the memories of two massive accidents that did a lot of damage to our beaches. The first, and most devastating, was the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969. It was the largest oil spill in United States waters at the time. The source of the spill was a blow-out on January 28, 1969, six miles from the coast on Union Oil’s Platform A.
Within a ten-day period, over 4 million gallons of crude oil spilled into the Channel and onto the beaches of Santa Barbara County, fouling the coastline from Goleta to Ventura as well as the northern shores of the Channel Islands.
The spill had a significant impact on marine life in the Channel, killing thousands of sea birds, as well as dolphins, elephant seals, and sea lions.
Since the spill happened in the middle of the surf season, lots of surfers got intimate with the muck.
The attempt to clean the mess up used primitive and mostly ineffective methods, and the cleanup lasted for over a year. Local residents grew to despise the sight and smell of tar.
The public outrage caused by the spill resulted in environmental legislation being passed within the next several years, the birth of the modern environmental movement, and Earth Day.
On May 19, 2015, an oil pipeline in the hills above Refugio State Beach ruptured, spilling over 100,000 gallons of crude oil. A lot of that oil ran down a storm drain, through a ravine under the freeway and out into the ocean.
Clean up crews and civilians acted fast to clean up the beaches, but hundreds of animals along the coast were coated with the thick crude oil and many died. State parks, beaches and fisheries located along the Gaviota Coast were temporarily closed.
While the 2015 spill was not as severe as the 1969 spill, and cleanup methods had greatly improved, the incident further reinforced the public hatred of the oil industry. It also gave a lot of people that don’t go to the beach often the false impression that tar on the beach is caused by commercial oil drilling and oil spills.
From ancient Chumash to modern Californians, tar and oil have always been on our beaches, and it has always played a big part in the history of humans in California.
So that’s why we have tar on our beach. And why folks are quick to blame the oil companies. From the earliest humans to modern man, we have always found ways to utilize the oil oozing out of the earth.
Tar. It’s not hard to get off your feet, and it’s a small price to pay for the pleasure of enjoying some of the most beautiful beaches in the world.
Pardon a plug for a product we really like and fits in on this page.
If you’re a longtime local, you probably have stories of what your family used to get the tar off your feet. Remarkably, gasoline and turpentine were very popular choices. They did work, but not very safe or healthy choices. Luckily today there is a local business started by a surfer right here in Goleta that offers a safe and pleasant smelling product that works very well.
Click this link to support a local business and give it a try. Oil Slick Tar Remover. You won’t be disappointed.
Great read. Yeah, growing on the beach here in a surfing family and spent a lot of time getting tar on my feet. My parents used lighter fluid (!) to get our tar off. Sounds crazy, but as they say in chemistry “like dissolves like”. We use canola oil these days, but I like the looks of the local product mentioned.
I’ve spent a LOT of time on the ocean around the Naples-Ellwood-IV area over the decades fishing and the oil slicks can really trash your fishing line as well. Sometimes, you’d go out with a fresh spool and get absolutely ruined with oil in an hour or two fishing for bass. It was usually worth it back then though. It definitely sticks to boat hulls as well. Diesel in a bucket was used on the sportboats back then.
YES BASIC! All of a sudden you are talking about your professional surfing career every day. And your extensive experience as lead deckhand on the Hornet makes you a surf fishing ninja. Not buying any of it.
GeneralTree – where are you from?
I highly doubt you are from around here, sound more like an LA area transit.
You have city hands Ka Pono. This is between me and Lance Burkehart.
I was born on the Hornet, Turtle. Take the twinny back to the Arizona wave pool Ka Pono.
Cry about it some more.
That’s funny, KaPo. What island you from?
He’s from the $799 all-inclusive Kauai package deal.
Funny, you never answered the question. Must have hit home on that one.
Orange county? San Bernadino? Indio?
I am not from the islands, just love visiting them, many, many time over.
Funny to watch you all pile on – I know Sac is from down south, he admitted it.
Haskulls.
Haskooks
Another non-local out-of-towner . .. . go back.
Yeah, I was here as a little kid, left and came back. Cry about it. Haskooks always crying about something–try and surf Ed’s sometime and get run out.
Not crying a bit.
Not a big fan of Oahu, and your right I probably would be run out, that’s ok, plenty of other spots to surf. A friend of mine had a place on the North shore, got to stay there a few weeks and enjoy the great surf. Never tried to act like a local, and did not get ‘run off’ and caught some great waves- all about the attitude.
Aloha
Wait, fakedoc was a deck hand on the hornet???!!!! And grew up surfing here ??!!!
Oh man, that puts it all together. Ran this foo out of the water at Ed’s in like 2005. I don’t think he ever sarfed again.
Not just any deckhand, he apparently “ran the decks” the same time I was on that boat weekly with my buds. Funny thing is, I knew the lead. Was not a “scientist” in any way shape or form.
lol! Classic stuff. Since I was 16 or so – no, I was not a scientist yet! What kind of weird online fantasy world do you guys live in? Go get out. And you don’t even know what year it was, but hey – it’s fun to see the 2 angry muppets are so interested, thanks for the entertainment today.
He was chief comfort officer of the USS Hornet.
Manipulated again. You always take the bait.
Definitely not yet, even. Someone who understands science is not antivax, and most certainly does not support the orange moron’s efforts to dismantle education and science research.
Wow another great article Tom! Thank you for making all your research available and so very engaging. Those photos of the asphalt works in early Goleta are so good. I appreciate you placing this phenomenon in the context of offshore oil drilling. There are many reasons to be concerned about oil rigs off our coast, but beach tar isn’t really one of them. I highly recommend people visit the new Chumash Museum in Santa Ynez. It’s definitely worth the drive and has quite a bit about how the local native people used beach tar.
I’m an avid barefoot runner on local beaches, mostly More Mesa beach since I live nearby, with it’s giant, time-hardened, elephant-sized black boulder blobs oozing out of the cliff, and beach tar has always been present. It’s not always sticky, however. If we get a big deposit that sits at the high tide level sand for a few days it doesn’t stick to your feet as much. I just wipe it off completely with a little towel I carry with me on runs. It’s not necessary to dissolve it with oil, peanut butter, solvent or whatever. It just wipes off, with some effort of course, and it’s never a big problem.
Great article, Tom, thanks.
And condolences on your mother’s death. Sounds like she had a great life.
Tom is the best for local history!
Any kind of oil removes tar from feet. My preference is vegetable oil.
Yes. I agree. To remove tar from skin, our Mom used vegetable oil, an old butterknife and a rag. For clothing, it took an application of veg oil, scraping off of the tar w/ butterknife and then a good scrubbing of the stain —- using Fels-Naptha (hard bar soap). Fels-naptha is terrific for removing all sorts of stains, particularly tar and blood.
Terrific article, Tom. Splendidly done, as always.