"It was interesting to see how it was portrayed to the public," said geological sciences associate professor James H. Knapp of the geopolitical struggles for Caspian Sea oil depicted in The World Is Not Enough, the 1999 Bond movie.

Knapp, who has conducted research in the Caspian Sea region since the early 1990s, was also pleased that the movie, the 19th installment in the 007 series, focused attention on what is at stake in the energy future of the West and the economic stability of Central Asia.

"What happens in this incredibly strategic region will also go a long way toward determining our country's future relationships with countries like Iran," he said. For the better part of the past decade, Knapp has conducted earth science research in the area, beginning in the former Soviet Union while he was working with oil companies. He became interested in the Caspian Sea because of its vast petroleum reserves.

The area is believed to be second only to the Persian Gulf in terms of its oil resources, yet more research is needed to determine the amount of oil, and how to best extract it and get it to market.

Working with several American and foreign oil companies, Knapp, first at Cornell University and now with USC, has been studying the geologic and tectonic history of the Caspian Sea's lower basin in its southern half. He uses seismic reflection of the earth's crust and processes the resulting data with a computer to provide a visual image of what lies below the surface.

Typically, the oil industry is focused on the upper five to six kilometers where it is likely to find petroleum reserves, but Knapp takes his work a step further to look at the planet's entire crust, as well as the underlying mantle, which together comprise the lithosphere or the plates that move around on the Earth's surface and are the fundamental element of plate tectonics.

"One of our research interests has been to understand why there is such an abundance of oil in the Caspian Sea region and how that is related to the geologic history of the basin since its inception," he said.

Before Knapp's work, no one had provided an image of the thickness of the Caspian Sea's southern basin, a diagram of which now appears in poster form on the hallway outside of his office on the second floor of the Earth and Water Sciences building.

"We've been able to document in a conclusive way that this is one of, if not the thickest sedimentary basins in the entire history of the Earth," he said, adding that the depth to which sediments are buried is crucial to evaluating where companies will find petroleum.

Apart from being one of the world's most abundant oil reserves, the Caspian Sea is also an area of seismic activity where volcanic action often causes oil and gas to burn on the earth's surface. Knapp's work, which he is conducting at USC with Camelia Diaconescu, a research assistant professor, and doctoral candidate Eugenio Asencio, includes imaging and defining the geologic structures of active faults, and the study of "mud volcanoes" found above and below the surface of the water that can blow out mud, gas, oil, and rock fragments so explosively that they have all the look and feel of a volcano.

"There are more than 230 mud volcanoes prevalent throughout the western Caspian Sea and they pose a significant threat to the petroleum exploration and recovery operations," Knapp said.

Methane and other natural "greenhouse" gases associated with the mud volcanoes are also of concern to scientists because of their potential affect on a major global climate change were they somehow to suddenly be released into the atmosphere. The abundance of petroleum reserves in the Caspian Sea and in other areas such as the Gulf of Mexico and Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, begs the question of what happened to the so-called energy crisis of the 1970s.

"That simply hasn't turned out to be the case," said Knapp, noting that all the dire warnings point out that "you can only make predictions based on present-day technology and a present-day sense of what's economically feasible.

"But the fact is that as a result of those energy crises, the companies who became more technologically advanced and started looking where they couldn't recover oil before have now helped the world become awash in oil."

Any development of alternative energy sources will probably be driven more out of a legitimate concern for global warming than it will the supply of petroleum, Knapp said. Even if China and the former USSR fully develop their economies, "we probably still have at least a 50-year supply left."