Publications

The Eagle Ford shale is a major continuous oil and gas resource play in southcentral Texas and a source for other oil accumulations in the East Texas Basin. As part of the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) petroleum system assessment and research efforts, a coring program to obtain several immature, shallow cores from near the outcrop belt in central Texas has been undertaken. The first of these cor

Basin-wide datasets that provide information on the geochemical properties of petroleum systems, such as source rock quality, product composition, and thermal maturity, are often difficult to come by or assemble from publicly available data. When published studies are available and include these kinds of properties, they generally have few sampling locations and limited numbers and types of analys

Determining the chemical and mineralogical variability within fine-grained mudrocks poses analytical challenges but is potentially useful for documenting subtle stratigraphic differences in physicochemical environments that may influence petroleum reservoir properties and behavior. In this study, we investigate the utility of combining principal component analysis (PCA) of X-ray diffraction (XRD)

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has conducted an assessment of water and proppant requirements, and water production volumes, associated with possible future production of undiscovered petroleum resources in the Bakken and Three Forks Formations, Williston Basin, USA. This water and proppant assessment builds directly from the 2013 USGS petroleum assessment for the Bakken and Three Forks Formati

Low-temperature hydrous pyrolysis (LTHP) at 300°C (572°F) for 24 h released retained oils from 12- to 20-meshsize samples of mature Niobrara marly chalk and marlstone cores. The released oil accumulated on the water surface of the reactor, and is compositionally similar to oil produced from the same well. The quantities of oil released from the marly chalk and marlstone by LTHP are respectively 3.

The 5.46±0.04 Ma Broadwell Mesa basalt and associated basaltic volcanic field in the western Bristol Mountains, California, formed a ~6 km2 volcanic flow field with architecture including numerous lava flows, a ~1.1 km2 lava lake, and a ~0.17 km2 cinder cone. The local number of lava flows varies from one along the margins of the field to as many as 18 that are stacked vertically, onlapped by you

The Soda–Avawatz and Bristol–Granite Mountains faults are considered by some to form the northeastern margin of the eastern California shear zone yet their connectivity and extents are obscured by surficial deposits and the estimates of total right-lateral offset from geologic data range from 0 to as much as 24 km. We use gravity and recently released detailed aeromagnetic data to map strands of t

The Yakima fold province, located in the backarc of the Cascadia subduction zone, is a region of active strain accumulation and deformation distributed across a series of fault-cored folds. The geodetic network in central Washington has been used to interpret large-scale N-S shortening and westward-increasing strain; however, geodetic data are unable to resolve shortening rates across individual s

No abstract available.

No abstract available.

Large quantities of impact-related microspherules have been found in fine-grained sediments retained within seven out of nine, radiocarbon-dated, Late Pleistocene mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) and bison (Bison priscus) skull fragments. The well-preserved fossils were recovered from frozen “muck” deposits (organic-rich silt) exposed within the Fairbanks and Klondike mining districts of Alaska, US

Black shales of the Late Devonian to Early Mississippian Bakken Formation are characterized by high concentrations of organic carbon and the hyper-enrichment (> 500 to 1000s of mg/kg) of V and Zn. Deposition of black shales resulted from shallow seafloor depths that promoted rapid development of euxinic conditions. Vanadium hyper-enrichments, which are unknown in modern environments, are likely th