Announcements

Socorro County is considered an area of substantial COVID-19 transmission. Effective Tuesday, August 3, NMT is requiring all students, faculty and staff to wear a mask in public indoor settings on New Mexico Tech property, including off campus offices. This expectation applies to all individuals, whether vaccinated or unvaccinated, unless they are alone in an office, lab, classroom, or residence hall room.

Please note that this announcement supersedes all previous guidelines on campus and signage may not reflect the current situation.

Archiving data and housing geological collections is an important role the Bureau of Geology plays in improving our understanding of the geology of New Mexico. Our Geologic Information Center has made many of our archived photographs and documents available online via a dedicated portal that uses ResourceSpace, an open-source digital asset management system. Additional archival materials are regularly being added to the system, so be sure to check back frequently.

If you have historical documents, photographs or mine maps and would like to contribute to our archives (or allow us to copy), please let us know.

The new paper: "Beryl as indicator of metasomatic processes in the California Blue Mine topaz-beryl pegmatite and associated miarolitic pockets" was published in Lithos.

Dr. Alex Gysi, a co-author of the new paper, arrived at the Bureau in 2020 and is instrumenting a new Ore Deposits & Critical Minerals Research Laboratory. He is assembing a team of doctoral students and post-doctoral reseachers to staff the laboratory.

Dissertation research by NMBGMR scientist Dr. Snir Attia was published as a new paper in Geosphere. This work was a compilation of detrital zircon age data within the intra-arc strata of the Sierra Nevada.

Dr. Attia joined the NMBGMR in 2020 and is now working on zircon provenance studies in the southwest, among other projects.

This new paper describes and analyzes the petroleum system of the Mancos Shale in the San Juan Basin with a focus on the recent offshore Mancos play. The reservoirs in the offshore Mancos play are fine-grained, low-permeability sandstones interbedded with shales. These sandstones are carrier beds that link the shale source rocks that generated the oil in the deep, northern part of the basin with the conventional, coarser-grained and higher permeability conventional sandstone reservoirs in the shallow southern part of the basin. The conventional sandstone reservoirs were mostly developed in the 1950’s and have produced most of the oil in the basin. Unlike the conventional sandstone reservoirs which were developed with vertically drilled wells, development of the carrier bed reservoirs is enhanced by the new technique of drilling wells vertically to the target zone and thence horizontally through the target zone for distances of one mile or more. The paper appears in a special issue of the AAPG Bulletin that focuses on carrier bed oil reservoirs.

We seek motivated candidates with a strong interest in high-temperature hydrothermal experimental geochemistry, EXAFS and Raman/UV-Vis spectroscopy, chemical thermodynamics and computational geochemistry. These positions are part of the new collaborative U.S. geoscience critical minerals experimental – thermodynamic research hub between New Mexico Tech (NMT), Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), and Indiana University Bloomington (IUB), which is a Department of Energy (DOE), Basic Energy Sciences, funded project (https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-announces-30-million-research-secure-domestic-supply-chain-critical-elements-and).

Bureau of Geology scientist Dr. Mairi Litherland summarizes earthquake activity linked to oil and gas activity in the Bureau of Geology's Summer 2021 New Mexico Earth Matters publication.

This new paper, titled "Petrogenesis of silica-rich carbonatites from continental rift settings: a missing link between carbonatites and carbonated silicate melts?", presents the results of petrography, chemistry, and stable isotopes of four silicocarbonatites from rift settings (Lemitar Mts, New Mexico; Iron Hill, Colo, Sukulu and Tororo, Uganda). The paper presents a model that explains the origin of silicocarbonatites from parental carbonated silicate melts vis liquid immiscibility. This study also explains the link between silicate and carbonatite melts found throughout the world.

These story maps were produced by our Aquifer Mapping Program:

• Groundwater in New Mexico: Our precious shared resource
• Estancia Basin: Geology and Groundwater
• Pecos Slope Groundwater