Project Info

Sediment dispersal patterns in the Permian Basin, Texas: Constraints from detrital zircon geochronology and heavy mineral abundance data

Zane Jobe | zanejobe@mines.edu

From modern landscapes, we know that rivers and winds move sediment down from mountainous regions into accumulations in sedimentary basins. During the Permian period in North America, two sediment sources delivered sediment into the Permian Basin in Texas: rivers carried sediment eastward from the ancestral Rocky Mountains, and winds/sand dunes carried sediment westward from the Appalachian Mountains. This project focuses on reconstructing the paleogeography of the Permian Basin during Leonardian time (285-275 Ma), particularly the interplay of sediment delivered from the west (by rivers) and the east (by sand dunes). The student will help design the entire project, including planning a sampling campaign, sample processing, and data analysis. Specifically, the project activities will include sampling 8-10 sandstones from central New Mexico south into west Texas, extracting the ‘heavy minerals’ from them (e.g., zircon, monazite, rutile, magnetite), and dating ~100 detrital zircons from each sample using a mass spectrometer. By knowing the age distributions of the zircons, we can determine the sediment provenance (i.e., where the sediment came from, for example the Appalachians or the ancestral Rocky Mountains).
This project has broad applications, including constraining the timing of the ancestral Rocky Mountain uplifts and Permian paleoclimate reconstruction (i.e., wet vs. dry cycles). In addition, this project will help provide predictions of oil and gas accumulations in the Permian Basin by constraining when and where sandstones were deposited.

More Information

For an example of the end-product that we would like to produce, see this paper by Dickinson and Gehrels (2009) https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/gsabulletin/article/121/3-4/408-433/2365
For an introduction to dating detrital zircons, see this short course (module 4) https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1RGx40B8wy2QYd3IOYIhvCv9-QZa8AadSQjroYdUnzzY&hl=en#

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