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. See the NMT COVID-19 page for more information.

"The Rio Chama guide features clear, engrossing, and scientifically accurate descriptions of the rocks and landscapes that the rivers traverse. The geologic information is easy for a layperson to understand and is interspersed with facts about more recent history of the area..." [see full review in Pasatiempo]
— Robin Martin, owner of the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper

Virgil is the Senior Mineralogist/Economic Geologist and Director of the Mineral Museum at the New Mexico Bureau of Mines & Mineral Resources. He's also an adjunct curator at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. He's published over 80 articles in scientific journals, textbooks and popular magazines.

Mineral Talks LIVE is a joint-venture effort put on by BlueCap Productions, the Mineralogical and Geological Museum, Harvard University and the Society of Mineral Museum Professionals (SMMP).

View a video of the 11/3/2021 webinar on on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uMatMtYBgE

Watch: "New Mexico’s 50 Year Water Plan: A Solid Foundation" — a short video featuring authors discussing their report, also referred to as the Leap Ahead Analysis Assessment.

Read more about the Climate & Water Science Advisory Panel and download the report.

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If you have historical documents, photographs or mine maps and would like to contribute to our archives (or allow us to copy), please let us know.

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).

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