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Title: Megabreccias of the Sheep Range, Clark County, Nevada
Author: Don E. French and Peter L. Guth
Year: 2016
Series: Nevada Petroleum and Geothermal Society 2016 Field Trip Guidebook, NPS26
Version:
Format: 50 pages, color, coil-bound booklet
Scale:
A one-day field trip will examine well-exposed megabreccias in the vicinity of the Sheep Range, 50 miles north of Las Vegas. The development of rift basins during Basin-Range tectonism caused gravity-induced mass movement resulting in the deposition of numerous megabreccias of Paleozoic rocks in syntectonic Tertiary strata. Some of these are excellent petroleum reservoirs in the region, with permeability up to 2 darcies and tested production rates of 13,000 to 21,000 BOPD. A surface analog is represented by outcrops on the west flank of the Sheep Range and in the adjacent basin The field trip will visit outcrops that show stratigraphic relationships with Tertiary sediments that encase megabreccias, as well as examples of the remarkable texture that is common in these deposits. This field trip may be useful to anyone interested in rift-basin stratigraphy and the potential reservoir rocks associated with those deposits.
Trip Leaders:
Prof. Peter L. Guth, Dept. of Oceanography, U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland. Author of numerous articles on the geology of the region, including, Geology of the Sheep Range, Clark County, Nevada, Ph.D. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1980.
Don E. French, Ciannis Exploration, Billings, Montana. Author of numerous articles about the petroleum geology of the Great Basin, including Debris slides of the Railroad Valley area: Yet another interpretation of Grant Canyon and Bacon Flat Fields, Nye County, Nevada, presentation at 1993 AAPG Rocky Mountain Section Meeting (abstract).
Jerry Walker, Consulting Geologist, Reno, Nevada. 2016 Section Meeting Co-chair and co-author of Megabreccia of the Basin-Range Province: How everything is just like Grant Canyon Field, presentation to Nevada Petroleum Society, May 3, 2007.
Table of Contents
Field Description and Itinerary
Road Log
Stop 1. Regional Setting
- General Geologic Map
- Stratigraphy of Sheep Range Area
- Regional Geologic and Tectonic Setting
- Field Trip Overview
Stop 2. White Rock Canyon
- Historical Background - Railroad Valley Production
- Detachment Model
- Landslide Model
- Previous Field Investigations
- Regional Distribution of Megabreccias
- Definitions
- Characteristics of Megabreccias
- Fractured Cavernous Texture
- Long Runout and Megaclasts
- Stop 2 Area Map and Description
Stop 3. Deadman Canyon
- Stop 3 Area Map
- Relict Bedding
- Sedimentary Breccia
Stop 4. Black Hills Gap
- Stop 4 Area Map
- Cross Section A-A’
References
Appendix A (pdf version only)
- Stop 5 Hoodoo Hills Havoc
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