Publications

Shorelines and surficial deposits (including buried forest-floor mats and organic-rich wetland sediments) show that Great Salt Lake did not rise higher than modern lake levels during the earliest Holocene (11.5–10.2 cal ka BP; 10–9 14C ka BP). During that period, finely laminated, organic-rich muds (sapropel) containing brine-shrimp cysts and pellets and interbedded sodium-sulfate salts...

Until now, up-to-date, comprehensive, spatial, national-scale data on hydraulic fracturing water volumes have been lacking. Water volumes used (injected) to hydraulically fracture over 263,859 oil and gas wells drilled between 2000 and 2014 were compiled and used to create the first U.S. map of hydraulic fracturing water use. Although median annual volumes of 15,275 m3 and 19,425 m3 of...

Coalbed methane (CBM) makes up a significant portion of the world’s natural gas resources. The discovery that approximately 20% of natural gas is microbial in origin has led to interest in microbially enhanced CBM (MECoM), which involves stimulating microorganisms to produce additional CBM from existing production wells. This paper reviews current laboratory and field research on...

The paleohydrology of ephemeral stream systems is an important constraint on paleoclimatic conditions in arid environments, but remains difficult to constrain quantitatively. For example, sedimentary records of the size and extent of pluvial lakes in the Mojave Desert have been used as a proxy for Quaternary climate variability. Although the delivery mechanisms of this additional water...

The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the U.S. Department of State, quantitatively assessed the potential for unconventional oil and gas resources within the onshore portions of the Tampico-Misantla Basin, Burgos Basin, and Sabinas Basin provinces of northeastern Mexico. Unconventional resources of the Veracruz Basin were not quantitatively assessed because of a current lack of...

“Unconventional reservoirs” for carbon dioxide (CO2) storage—that is, geologic reservoirs in which changes to the rock trap CO2 and therefore contribute to CO2 storage—including coal, shale, basalt, and ultramafic rocks, were the focus of a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) workshop held March 28 and 29, 2012, at the National Conservation Training Center in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. The...

Laguna Mar Chiquita (central Argentina; ~latitude 31°S, longitude 63°W) provides an outstanding opportunity to examine organic facies development and petroleum source-rock potential in a modern thick-skinned foreland basin lake. In this case study, we define profundal, paleodelta, and lake-margin depositional environments based on trends in bathymetry and lake-floor sediment particle...

The Julian 7.5' quadrangle lies within the Jurassic-Cretaceous Peninsular Ranges batholith of southern California and Baja California. Four granitic plutonic units and one gabbroic unit, most comprising a number of individual plutons, have been mapped in the Julian quadrangle and informal names have been assigned. The formal name Cuyamaca Gabbro has been retained. In addition to these...

A geologic model was developed for the assessment of potential Mesozoic tight-gas resources in the deep, central part of upper Cook Inlet Basin, south-central Alaska. The basic premise of the geologic model is that organic-bearing marine shales of the Middle Jurassic Tuxedni Group achieved adequate thermal maturity for oil and gas generation in the central part of the basin largely due...

Middle Jurassic strata of the Gaikema Sandstone were deposited about 170 million years ago on a delta that was located on the western shoreline of the Cook Inlet basin (Detterman and Hartsock, 1966; LePain and others, 2011, 2013). The delta was built by swift, sediment-laden rivers that flowed southeastward from a mountainous volcanic terrane west of the Bruin Bay fault (fig. 6-1). Upon...

Many epithermal gold-silver deposits are temporally and spatially associated with late Oligocene to Pliocene magmatism of the southern ancestral Cascade arc in western Nevada and eastern California. These deposits, which include both quartz-adularia (low- and intermediate-sulfidation; Comstock Lode, Tonopah, Bodie) and quartz-alunite (high-sulfidation; Goldfield, Paradise Peak) types...

The objective of this report is to provide basic technical information regarding the CO2-EOR process, which is at the core of the assessment methodology, to estimate the technically recoverable oil within the fields of the identified sedimentary basins of the United States. Emphasis is on CO2-EOR because this is currently one technology being considered as an ultimate long-term geologic...