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, in the construction of pipes and whistles, to cement fractures in broken bowls and vessels, and many more uses.

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.

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. 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 Jan. 28, 1969, six miles from the coast on Union Oil’s Platform A.

Within a 10-day period, more than 4 million gallons of crude oil spilled into the Santa Barbara 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. 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.

The second spill was on May 19, 2015, when an oil pipeline in the hills above Refugio State Beach ruptured, spilling more than 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 clean-up methods had greatly improved, the incident further reinforced the public hatred of the oil industry.

It also gave a lot of people who don’t often go to the beach the false impression that tar on the beach is caused by commercial oil drilling and oil spills.

So that’s why we have tar on our beach, and why folks are quick to blame the oil companies. Tar and oil have been oozing out of the earth and on to our beaches for as long as we’ve been recording history, and probably longer.

From ancient Chumash to modern Californians, humans have always found ways to use tar, and it has played a big part in our history, good and bad. Luckily, 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.

Sources: UCSB, Venoco, Paul Costales, Milton Love, Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

(Pardon a plug for a product we really like.)

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, environment friendly and pleasant smelling product that works very well. It’s called Oil Slick Tar Remover. Look for it online and in local stores, you won’t be disappointed.