One of the largest oil producing areas of the world is located in West Texas.
This area is known as the Permian Basin. Most of the oil is being produced from rocks formed in the Permian Period. The largest amounts of these rocks are located in the Permian Basin and southeastern New Mexico. That is why this area is known as the Permian Basin. The main features of the Permian Basin was formed in the early part of the Paleozoic area but it wasn't until the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian
Periods that the folding occurred in which formed the outlines of the basin as it is presented to us today. (Intro to Petroleum Geology of the Permian Basin) Our basic composition of the Permian Basin is made up of sand, distance, and
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There are also a lot of crusted plates, and violent volcanoes that are located in our region. In our Big Bend and Fort Davis areas, when traveling down the highway you may find many sedimentary deep filled basins and uplifted landscapes where you can tell erosion played a huge part in their current forms.
(Roadside Geology of Texas)
The earth as we know it can be divided from the center outward into three concentric shells. These shells are known as the Lithosphere, Hydrosphere, and the atmosphere.
Basically these are the general features of the Earth and I am going to give you a description in which you may be able to define the uses of these in our every day life. The Lithosphere: (rock sphere) is the solid sphere in which we live, farm and build our buildings of our cities. It is 8,000 miles in diametere and 26,000 miles in circumference. The outer few miles of lithosphere is made up of rock called crust. Hydrosphere: This is where the water sphere is located. It is made up of everything that contains water: Oceans, Rivers , Lakes, as well as the groundwater. The main purpose we use this for is to drill wells into so that we may obtain the water
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The atmosphere is important to all living things because it gives us oxygen which is the important factor to process life. (Intro to Petroleum
Geology of the Permian Basin) The feature that makes up our lovely West Texas region A.K.A. the Permian Basin, is three rock types. These are found exclusively in the Big Bend, and Marathon regions.
These rock types are Igneous, Sedimentary, and Metamorphic. These are found throughout most of the Permian Basin area. Here are some brief definitions in which you may define these rock types. These definitions come from the book(Intro to Petroleum
Geology of the Permian Basin) . Igneous Rocks: formed by the cooling and solidfication of molten material called magma. Sedimentary Rocks: formed from particles that were deposited by water, air, or ice. Metamorphic Rocks: formed from sedimentary and igneous rocks, but altered by heat, pressure, and fluids to a different form and mineral composition. Erosion as mentioned earlier has played a huge role in defining and shaping our scenic view and landscapes of West Texas. When looking up at one of these magnificent ancient volcanoes, you can estimate pretty much exactly how much rock has been
Van Staal, C.R., Whalen, J.B., Valverde-Vaquero, P., Zagorevski, A., and Rogers, N. (2009) Pre-Carboniferous, Episodic Accretion-Related, Orogenesis along the Laurentian Margin of the Northern Appalachians. Geological Society, London, Special Publications, vol. 327, p. 271-316.
The Mantle makes up 70% of the Earth’s mass and is mostly solid but capable of flow, causing changes in the Earth’s surface.
Later after the sea finally retreated occurred volcanic activity. Mountains rose through laccoliths, which also resemble volcanoes. These laccoliths differ in that they do not erupt. They shifted layers of rock upward in the shape of a dome. This specific piece of geologic morphology occurred at the end of the Cretaceous time. This marked the beginning of the Laramide Orogeny, which was a well-known period of mountain formation in western North America.
Plummer, C.C., McGeary, D., and Carlson, D.H., 2003, Physical geology (10th Ed.): McGraw-Hill, Boston, 580 p.
Conclusion: One of the greatest economic booms in history had an everlasting ripple effect on culture, businesses, and lifestyle in Texas. The discovery of oil in Texas allowed America to take leap forward into a leading nation. Texas oil gave America a fighting edge to win the war, gave Americans advantage to travel faster and quicker. Texas oil helped America go from agriculture nation into the top industrial nation much quicker than anticipated.
Oklahoma's oil and natural gas industry is giving us unstoppable progress for energy solutions, but the other parts of the nation are still searching for theirs. While providing jobs for the thousands of people who live in Oklahoma, the oil and natural gas industry not only donates to America's petroleum production, but it also produces millions of dollars for our state’s economy, schools, and roads. Making new headways in our industry every day, artificial technology, scientific breakthroughs, adequate new exploration, and drilling methods took place. Without these upgrades, we would not be able to extract oil and natural gas from challenging fields more efficiently than we can now. As capability rises, environmental impact will continue to go down. In 1897, a tower of surging oil divided the Bartlesville sky. Oklahoma's preliminary drilling swaged badly, brought forth by the federal controls on wellhead prices of natural gas applied to interstate commerce in the 1950s. By 1982, oil prices hit an all time high of $37.60 per barrel. Furthermore, the number of progressive drilling rigs in Oklahoma also hit a record of 882. The total quantity produced from the soul and natural gas industry in Oklahoma reached about 40 billion dollars in 2007. Also, through the gross production tax, oil and natural gas producers and royalty owners gave more than 2 billion dollars to Oklahoma used for teacher retirement, public schools, wildlife management, bridges, roads, and state colleges. Petroleum remains an indispensable Sooner State industry. Natural gas continued to grow in the early 1990s despite of the entire staggering bust that was caused by the plummeting world crude oil p...
Oil provided new fuel for transportation and manufacturing, even railroads were able to convert to oil. Oil helped manufacturing plants and farms move to a cheaper source of energy. Another significant factor of oil is that it helped encourage automobile production as well as roads. The production of the Interstate highway led to the movement of people and goods (Champagne, Harpham 13). Rapid industrialization of the Gulf Coast region sparked. By 1929 in Harris County, 27 percent of all manufacturing employees worked in refineries. By 1940 the capacity of the refineries had increased fourfold. The oil and gas industries carried a boom-and-bust mentality (Oliena 1). The economy flourish at times and failed other times, because the prices would rise and fall. When new oil was discovered in a particular place it brought about more people, overcrowding the schools and new housing. Yet a couple years later the town could experience a bust creating poverty and making the town a ghost town. The oil and gas industry transformed the government and its role with the economy. The Texas Railroad Commission was extended to regulate energy and to promote well-spacing rules. Higher education benefitted through the oil and gas industry ( Munch, Francis, and Rundell 604). In 1923 oil was discovered in the West Texas Permian Basin on university land. The Permanent University Fund was split up between the
Smith, Julia C. "East Texas Oilfield." Handbook of Texas Online. Texas State Historical Association, 14 Apr. 2009. Web. 01 Apr. 2011.
It is well known that glaciation is the cause for how Yosemite looks today, but it is not as well known what happened before the relatively recent glaciation which happened about 15,000 years ago. The geologic history of Yosemite and the surrounding area starts 500 million years ago in the Paleozoic Era when the area was still under the waters of the Pacific Ocean (Beatty). This area had a passive fault, similar to the east coast of the United States today. The mud and silt from the ocean settled in the Yosemite area and eventually became shale, siltstone, and carbonate rocks (United States of America). By the end of the Ordovician Period, the fault changed from a passive to an active fault. The oceanic plate started to subduct under the continental crust and push the shale upward, forming the first mountains in the western United States. At first, these were volcanic islands off the coast. This formation is called the Shoo Fly Complex. T...
First up, of course, has to be the big one. Out of 254 counties in the state, 232 produce some quantity of oil. How did the petroleum industry get started in Texas? People actually knew about petroleum deposits in Texas long before they could figure out a good use for the stuff. Indians knew of seeps in the ground where petroleum oozed up long before Europeans found their way to the Americas. Those Europeans didn't know what to do with it either at first. Hernando de Soto's crew used the stuff to caulk their boats to make them watertight. The first Texas oil well was drilled in Nacogdoches County in 1866, and other small wells followed. The first major oil well in Texas was drilled in Corsicana in 1894, and the BIG one, Spindletop, blew out in grand style on January 10, 1901. But the demand for the oil took a while to catch up to production. After Spindletop, the country started seriously moving towards a petroleum-based economy.
Tarbuck E., Lutgens F., Tasa D., 2014, An Introduction to Physical Geology, 5th Ed, Pearson Education, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.
The concurrent convective circulations in the mantle leads to some segments of the mantle moving on top of the outer core which is very hot and molten in nature. This kind of movement in different segments occurs as tectonic plates. These tectonic plates are basically seven on the earth surface as major ones, although, several small ones exist also. The plates motions are characterized by varying velocities, this variance results to sub sequential collision of two plates (leading to formation of a mountain in a convergent boundary), drift of two plates (leading to formation of rifts in a divergent boundary), or parallel movement in a transform boundary(Webcache 3).
The lithosphere is an open system, which contains all of the cold, hard, solid rock of the planet's crust (surface), the hot semi-solid rock that lies underneath the crust, the hot liquid rock near the center of the planet, and the solid iron core (center) of the planet (Answers.com). On Earth, the lithosphere comprises the crust and the upper part of the mantle. The lithosphere is about sixty miles thick (Lenkeit).
The earth is a solid sphere. It is made up of three concentric spheres or layers. These are called the core, the mantle, and the crust. The solid sphere is surrounded by a gaseous sphere, which is called the atmosphere.