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
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.
The Franciscan Terrane of central California represents an accretionary complex formed by long-term subduction of an oceanic plate under the Western margin of the North American craton. The Franciscan complex is composed of three distinguishable belts: the eastern belt (Yolla Bolly and Pickett Peak terranes), the central belt, and the coastal belt. Age and metamorphic grade of the belts decreases to the west (Blake and Jones, 1981). Formation of the accretionary complex began during the late Jurassic in the eastern belt and has continued into the Miocene along the western coastal belt. The complex trends NNW and is bounded by the San Andreas Fault to the east and by the coastal range fault to the west. The coast range fault separates the Franciscan complex with the partly coeval Great Valley sequence. Debate exists over the tectonic evolution of the Franciscan, centered around the geographic origin of the Franciscan rock units.
Tarbuck E., Lutgens F., Tasa D., 2014, An Introduction to Physical Geology, 5th Ed, Pearson Education, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.
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.
During the Late Cretaceous a period of mountain building occurred along the west coast of North America. This is called the Laramide orogeny that started the Rocky Mountains growth about seventy-five million years ago. The Laramide orogeny was different from orogenies that had happened before hand. What caused the Laramide Orogeny is uncertain but there are many theories about what caused it. One big thing to better understand the Laramide orogeny is the theory of Uniformitarianism.
Indicate the pressure sites in the earth's crust; the volcanic sites consistent with the pressure sites in the cortex where there are significant cracks and deep.
The Permian Period was the last period of the Paleozoic Era. During this geological time period’s earlier stages glaciation was extensive. Middle Permian began to warm, and by the late Permian the environment was hot and dry. The environmental conditions were so extreme that the marine and terrestrial life forms were greatly affected. According to research the drastic climate change could have been caused by the formation of Pangaea. In 1912 Alfred Wegener while studying his theory of the continental drift, discovered Pangaea’s very existence. A combination of all of Earth’s landmasses joined together and covered 1/3 of Earth’s surface. Pangaea was f...
In 1912, when looking at a map, he saw how the different continents when placed together like a jigsaw puzzle, can all join together. Although scorned at the time, many geologists now believe his theory was accurate, and that about 200 million years ago, there was one large supercontinent called Pangaea, which in Greek means all land. They believe that Pangea broke into two land masses about 145 million years ago: Gondwana and
The features of the earth are the domain of physical geographers and their work includes research about
For example, some major moons in our solar system that would serve as good representatives for this category would be Saturn’s moon Enceladus and Neptune’s moon Triton. Enceladus has a variety of ridges, faults and smooth plains. There is an area near the moons south pole where the terrain is cracked and twisted, which shows clear evidence of tectonic activity. There are also parts that have no craters or marks, which indicates more recent resurfacing. Triton has a region that contains irregular pits and hills near the bottom with a cratered terrain, and a region near the top with veinlike features. The rest of Triton has a geologically young surface, which is indicated by its lack of craters. The difference in the moons terrain shows that certain features occurred much more recently than others. We can study the terrains to determine when the features occurred, which tells us that some have occurred within the recent
Applied Environmental and Petroleum Geology - Groundwater contaminants and remediation techniques, hydrogeologic reports, well core and geophysical log analysis, structure contour maps and subsurface analysis, subsurface stratigraphic correlations of reservoirs and aquifers, basic foundation in characteristics of source, reservoir, and trap rocks for oil/gas
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 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 mantle is much thicker than the crust. It is about 30 km thick. It consists mainly of rocks, but we do not know much about their composition.