Publications

Introduction As the United States transitions away from fossil fuels, its economy will rely on more renewable energy. Because current renewable energy sources sometimes produce variable power supplies, it is important to store energy for use when power supply drops below power demand. Battery storage is one method to store power. However, geologic (underground) energy storage may be able...

An original magnetotelluric (MT) survey collected in 2017 included 42 MT stations mainly in the northwestern part of The Geysers geothermal field in northern California. These data were modeled in 3D and imaged the electrically conductive cover, the electrically resistive steam field, and the electrically resistive Geysers plutonic complex (Peacock et al., 2020; Peacock et al. 2020a)...

The Quaternary Clear Lake Volcanic Field (CLVF) in the Northern California Coast Range is the youngest of a string of northward-younging volcanic centers in the state. The CLVF is located within the broad San Andreas Transform Fault System and has been active intermittently for ∼2 million years. Heat beneath the CLVF supports The Geysers, one of the largest producing geothermal fields in...

Cities have important and varying incentives to transform their energy sector to all-electric with low carbon emissions. However, they often encounter a number of impediments when attempting to implement such a change. For example, while urban areas have the highest energy demand-density, cities often lack the space for installing additional energy generation and/or long-duration energy...

Coupled paleomagnetic and geochronologic data derived from mafic dykes provide valuable records of continental movement. To reconstruct the Proterozoic paleogeographic history of Peninsular India, we report paleomagnetic directions and U-Pb zircon ages from twenty-nine mafic dykes in the Eastern Dharwar Craton near Hyderabad. Paleomagnetic analysis yielded clusters of directional data...

In coordination with the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) and in response to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) produced a documented unplugged orphaned oil and gas well dataset (called the DOW dataset hereafter) that contains the location and status of these wells nationwide as of 2022. The DOW dataset includes 117,672 wells across 27 states...

Fracture healing is a critical component of enhanced geothermal systems, the earthquake cycle, and induced seismicity. Accordingly, there is significant interest in understanding the process of healing and its effects on fluid transport. The creation, reactivation, and sustainability of fracture networks depend on complex coupling among thermal, hydraulic, mechanical, and chemical...

Previous moderate- and high-temperature geothermal resource assessments of the western United States utilized data-driven methods and expert decisions to estimate resource favorability. Although expert decisions can add confidence to the modeling process by ensuring reasonable models are employed, expert decisions also introduce human and, thereby, model bias. This bias can present a...

Founding populations of the first Americans likely occupied parts of Beringia during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). The timing, pathways, and modes of their southward transit remain unknown, but blockage of the interior route by North American ice sheets between ~26 and 14 cal kyr BP (ka) favors a coastal route during this period. Using models and paleoceanographic data from the North...

Carlin-type gold deposits (CTDs) of Nevada are the largest producers of gold in the United States, a leader in world gold production. Although much has been resolved about the characteristics and origin of CTDs in Nevada, major questions remain, especially about (1) the role of magmatism, whether only a source of heat or also metals, (2) whether CTDs only formed in the Eocene, and (3)...

The R package iBluff is designed for coastal bluffs/bluffs morphological analysis and offers an automatic and reproducible alternative to identify bluff edges using a bare earth digital elevation model (DEM) instead of hand digitizing. This package extracts elevation profiles along automatically identified transects on the bluff-face, bluff top, toe, secondary inflections, relative...

Geothermal well data from Southern Methodist University and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) were used to create maps of estimated background conductive heat flow across the Great Basin region of the western United States. These heat flow maps were generated as part of the USGS hydrothermal and Enhanced Geothermal Systems resource assessment process, and the creation process seeks to...