Publications

Advanced Spaceborne Thermal and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) data of the early Quaternary Khanneshin carbonatite volcano located in southern Afghanistan were used to identify carbonate rocks within the volcano and to distinguish them from Neogene ferruginous polymict sandstone and argillite. The carbonatitic rocks are characterized by diagnostic CO3 absorption near 11.2 μm and 2.31–2.33...

The lignite deposits within the upper Eocene Yegua Formation (Claiborne Group) and the overlying Jackson Group are among the coal resources that were not quantitatively assessed as part of the U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS) National Coal Resource Assessment (NCRA) program in the Gulf Coastal Plain coal province. In the past, these lignite-bearing stratigraphic units often have been...

The structural stability of methane hydrate under pressure at room temperature was examined by both in-situ single-crystal and powder X-ray diffraction techniques on samples with structure types I, II, and H in diamond-anvil cells. The diffraction data for types II (sII) and H (sH) were refined to the known structures with space groups Fd3m and P63/mmc, respectively. Upon compression, sI...

Two important trends affecting the expected growth of global gas markets are (1) the shift by many industrialized countries from coal-fired electricity generation to the use of natural gas to generate electricity and (2) the industrialization of the heavily populated Asian countries of India and China. This paper surveys discovered gas in stranded conventional gas accumulations and...

X-ray diffraction and Raman spectroscopy confirm a rare terrestrial occurrence of monoclinic tridymite in clast-rich impact melt rock from the Eyreville B drill core in the Chesapeake Bay impact structure. The monoclinic tridymite occurs with quartz paramorphs after tridymite and K-feldspar in a microcrystalline groundmass of devitrified glass and Fe-rich smectite. Electron-microprobe...

Archean and Proterozoic rocks exposed over about 16km2 between Atkins Lake and Coffee Lake in southeastern Bayfield County (Fig. 1) chronicle almost all of the major Precambrian geologic events in the history of the southern Superior Craton. The oldest rocks are part of a locally gneissic quartz monzonite complex, the Puritan Batholith, with an igneous Rb-Sr age of 2710+140 Ma (Sims et...

Coal fires occur in all coal-bearing regions of the world and number, conservatively, in the thousands. These fires emit a variety of compounds including greenhouse gases. However, the magnitude of the contribution of combustion gases from coal fires to the environment is highly uncertain, because adequate data and methods for assessing emissions are lacking. This study demonstrates the...

The National Coal Resource Assessment (NCRA) project of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has assessed the quantity and quality of the nation's coal deposits that potentially could be mined during the next few decades. For eight years, geologic, geochemical, and resource information was collected and compiled for the five major coal-producing regions of the United States: the Appalachian...

No abstract available.

A common practice for characterizing uncertainty in coal resource assessments has been the itemization of tonnage at the mining unit level and the classification of such units according to distance to drilling holes. Distance criteria, such as those used in U.S. Geological Survey Circular 891, are still widely used for public disclosure. A major deficiency of distance methods is that...

Tourmaline occurs in diverse types of hydrothermal mineral deposits and can be used to constrain the nature and evolution of ore-forming fl uids. Because of its broad range in composition and retention of chemical and isotopic signatures, tourmaline may be the only robust recorder of original mineralizing processes in some deposits. Microtextures and in situ analysis of compositional and...

This report describes the bituminous coal deposits of the Olmos Formation (Navarro Group, Upper Cretaceous; Figures 1, 2) of Maverick County in south Texas. Although these were not evaluated quantitatively as part of the current Gulf Coastal Plain coal-resource assessment, a detailed review is presented in this chapter. Prior to the late 1920s, these coal beds were mined underground on a...