Publications

The growth in the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has highlighted the need for regional and national digital geologic maps attributed with age and rock type information. Such spatial data can be conveniently used to generate derivative maps for purposes that include mineral-resource assessment, metallogenic studies, tectonic studies, human health and environmental research...

Sustained increases in energy prices have focused attention on gas resources in low permeability shale or in coals that were previously considered economically marginal. Daily well deliverability is often relatively small, although the estimates of the total volumes of recoverable resources in these settings are large. Planning and development decisions for extraction of such resources...

Geologic, production, and exploration/discovery-history data are used by the U.S. Geological Survey to aid in the assessment of petroleum resources. These data, as well as the broad knowledge and experience of the assessing geologists, are synthesized to provide, for each assessment unit, geologic and exploration models upon which estimates are made of the number and sizes of...

The Golden State got its nickname from the Sierra Nevada gold that lured so many miners and settlers to the West, but California has earned much more wealth from so-called “black gold” than from metallic gold. The San Joaquin Valley has been the principal source for most of the petroleum produced in the State during the past 145 years. In attempting to assess future additions to...

The foothills of the Brooks Range contain an enormous accumulation of zinc (Zn) in the form of zinc sulfide and barium (Ba) in the form of barite in Carboniferous shale, chert, and mudstone. Most of the resources and reserves of Zn occur in the Red Dog deposit and others in the Red Dog district; these resources and reserves surpass those of most deposits worldwide in terms of size and...

Yucca Mountain in southwestern Nevada is a prominent, irregularly shaped upland formed by a thick apron of Miocene pyroclastic-flow and fallout tephra deposits, with minor lava flows, that was segmented by through-going, large-displacement normal faults into a series of north-trending, eastwardly tilted structural blocks. The principal volcanic-rock units are the Tiva Canyon and Topopah...

Late Cretaceous Valle Group forearcbasin deposits on the Vizcaino Peninsula of Baja California Sur are dominated by firstcycle arc-derived volcanic-plutonic detritus derived from the adjacent Peninsular Ranges batholith. Craton-derived quartzite clasts are a minor but ubiquitous component in Valle Group conglomerates. The source of these clasts has implications for tectonic...

No abstract available.

Major natural bitumen accumulations in the United States are estimated to contain about 36 billion barrels of measured in-place resource and about 18 billion barrels of speculative in-place resource. Major natural bitumen resources are in Alabama, Alaska, California, Kentucky, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming.

This Workshop has its origins in the probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA) for Yucca Mountain, the designated site of the underground repository for the nation's high-level radioactive waste. In 1998 the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Senior Seismic Hazard Analysis Committee (SSHAC) developed guidelines for PSHA which were published as NUREG/CR-6372, 'Recommendations for...

Although reserve (or field) growth has proven to be an important factor contributing to new reserves in mature petroleum basins, it is still a poorly understood phenomenon. Limited studies show that the magnitude of reserve growth is controlled by several major factors, including (1) the reserve booking and reporting requirements in each country, (2) improvements in reservoir...

Beneath the foothills of the Brooks Range, rocks of the Lower Cretaceous-Tertiary Brookian and Jurassic-Lower Cretaceous Beaufortian megasequences have been deeply buried and exhumed, and now exhibit characteristics of 'tight gas sandstones'. The data recovered from drilling, well tests, and cores exhibit the potential for substantial gas reserves over a large area. These data include...