Publications

Accurate and precise analyses of oil and gas (O&G) wastewaters and solids (e.g., sediments and sludge) are important for the regulatory monitoring of O&G development and tracing potential O&G contamination in the environment. In this study, 15 laboratories participated in an inter-laboratory comparison on the chemical characterization of three O&G wastewaters from the Appalachian Basin...

Broad ion beam (BIB) milling is useful in organic petrology because it can yield flat sample surfaces and avert the ‘smearing’ of organic matter (OM) that results from traditional mechanical polishing. This potentially makes BIB especially useful in the study of nano-porosity, where even minor mechanical disruption of the sample surface distorts the sample characteristic of interest—the...

Epithermal gold-silver deposits are vein, stockwork, disseminated, and replacement deposits that are mined primarily for their gold and silver contents; some deposits also contain substantial resources of lead, zinc, copper, and (or) mercury. These deposits form in the uppermost parts of the crust, at depths less than about 1,500 meters below the water table, and at temperatures below...

Using a geology-based assessment methodology, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated undiscovered, technically recoverable mean resources of 10.7 trillion cubic feet of potential coalbed gas resources in the Kutei and Barito Basin Provinces of Indonesia.

We report data for 112 apatite and 31 zircon fission track (AFT and ZFT) outcrop sandstone samples along a transect that spans the western Brooks Range. Sampling targeted structures that modify the Middle Jurassic‐Early Cretaceous early Brookian orogen. The AFT samples record latest Cretaceous to Eocene in situ exhumational cooling and resolve two kinematic phases. The first phase was...

Little is known about how design and testing methodologies affect the macroinvertebrate communities that are held captive in mesocosms. To address this knowledge gap, we conducted a 32‐d test to determine how seeded invertebrate communities changed once removed from the natural stream and introduced to the laboratory. We evaluated larvae survival and adult emergence in controls from 4...

The West Siberian Basin Province is one of the largest sedimentary basins in the world, with an area of 2.6 million square kilometers, and the basin ranks first in the world with more than 400 billion barrels of oil-equivalent discovered petroleum. For the 2008 Circum-Arctic Resource Appraisal, the U.S. Geological Survey defined a Northern West Siberian Mesozoic Composite Total Petroleum...

Characterization of the subsurface thermal regime is critical for understanding many facets of the petroleum system, from thermal maturation of organic-rich source rocks to thermal preservation and non-degradation of hydrocarbon accumulations. On a broad scale, paleo-heatflow has been mapped for the North American continent (Blackwell and Richards, 2004) as well as the contiguous United...

The application of horizontal and hydraulically fractured wells for producing oil from low permeability formations has changed the face of the North American oil industry. One feature of the production profile of many such wells is a transition from transient linear oil flow to boundary-dominated flow. The identification of the time of this transition is important for the calibration of...

Brackish marine and brackish continental environments are fundamentally different from a compositional perspective. Brackish water is often defined as having salinity lower than that of standard seawater but higher than that of freshwater, but less regard is given to the origin of the salts involved. The simple dilution of standard seawater by freshwater in a coastal or estuarine setting

To improve the characterization of Holocene earthquakes on the Wasatch fault zone (WFZ), we conducted light detection and ranging (lidar)‐based neotectonic mapping and excavated a paleoseismic trench across an 8‐m‐high fault scarp near Alpine, Utah, located ∼6.2–0.4  ka∼6.2–0.4  ka. Interseismic recurrence ranges from 0.2 to 1.8 ky (mean 1.2 ky). We estimate 6.5±0.7  m6.5±0.7  m of...

The U.S. Geological Survey has evaluated the potential for undiscovered oil and gas resources of the Tunguska Basin Province as part of the Circum-Arctic Resource Appraisal (CARA). The Tunguska Basin Province includes an area of approximately 904,000 km2; less than half the area of the province lies north of the Arctic Circle. The Tunguska Basin Province includes a large part of the...