South Texas Geological Society Bulletins

This month's bulletin may look a bit different, as it does not feature a technical article. Instead, we are sending this newsletter to all of our members, regardless of membership status, as we have lots of exciting news to share!

Abstract: The increasing level of anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere has made it imperative to in-vestigate an efficient method for carbon sequestration. Geological carbon sequestration presents a via-ble path to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions by sequestering the captured CO2 deep underground in rock formations to store it permanently. Geochemistry, as the cornerstone of geological CO2 […]

This month's bulletin may look a bit different, as it does not feature a technical article. Instead, we are sending this newsletter to all of our members, regardless of membership status, as we have lots of exciting news to share!

Abstract.—Predation is a behavior that is commonly unsuccessful, but the cause of failure is often difficult to determine in the fossil record. Here, we report on gastropod drill holes in two Plio- and Miocene bivalve specimens from the Netherlands created from the inner side of the bivalve prey’s shell, which we call reverse drill holes. […]

SUMMARY: I have become fascinated by the gravity and magnetic publication of Romberg and Barnes (1954) and the geologic work of Young et al. (1975 and 1982) and Barker and Young (1979) on Pilot Knob when I became aware of the Pilot Knob volcano during one of the Austin Geological Society field trips. The more […]

ABSTRACT: The Eagle Ford Formation has attracted considerable industry attention as a self-sourced unconventional shale reservoir. The productive interval in the Eagle Ford Formation is the transgressive systems tract, which contains parasequences whose lithologic content varies upward with increasing proportions of limestones. Optimum success in both exploration and production depends on the adequate characterization of […]

Abstract: The Deepwater Horizon (DWH) spill released 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) over 87 days. Sediment and water sampling efforts were concentrated SW of the DWH and in coastal areas. Here we present geochemistry data from sediment cores collected in the aftermath of the DWH event from 1000 – […]

At least 16 crude oil refineries have recorded production, although only one remains today, the TSAR on South Presa. Three sites today are Superfund sites, one is an active products terminal, and the others are vacant or covered by development. This paper inventories the known and possible sites, with my best estimate of location and […]

Before 1877 (the coming of the railroad), the building of permanent stone structures relied on local materials. In particular, three sources of stone were used in the mission structures of the 1700s, five 18th-century San Antonio missions that were recently declared a World Heritage Site. Austin limestone, a soft distinctive fine-grained (chalky) limestone with variable […]

Abstract: The extraordinary paleontological record from Big Bend National Park (BIBE), Texas chronicles nearly 120 million years of largely uninterrupted deposition through Late Cretaceous, Paleogene and Neogene time. Therefore, the park records one of the most complete and continuous fossil records of its kind in North America, if not the world. Paleontologists have collected and […]

Abstract: The Mississippi Delta, a portion of the Mississippi Alluvial Plain (MAP) located in northwest Mississippi (USA), is an area dense with industrial-level agriculture sustained by groundwater-dependent irrigation supplied by the Mississippi River Valley alluvial aquifer. Observed declines in groundwater-level elevations and streamflow, contemporaneous with increases in irrigation, have raised concerns about future groundwater availability […]

Abstract: Land subsidence and sea level rise are well-known, ongoing problems that are negatively impacting the entire Texas coast. Although ground-based monitoring techniques using long-term global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) records provide accurate subsidence rates, they are labor-intensive, expensive, time-consuming, and spatially limited. In this study, interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) data and techniques were […]

Abstract: The history of events related to the sulfuric acid theory of cave development in the Guadalupe Mountains, New Mexico, USA, is traced from its earliest beginnings to the present. In the 1970s and early 1980s, when this hypothesis was first introduced, the reaction was one of skepticism. But as evidence mounted, it became more […]

Abstract: To better understand what drives erosion in central Nepal, we have mapped regions of preferential erosion by comparing modern detrital muscovite 40Ar/39Ar data to bedrock data from the Narayani river catchment and two sub-catchments in central Nepal. We compare our pattern of erosion to erosion patterns from previous studies. Each shows a zone of […]