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The history behind the Department of Geological Sciences at New Mexico State University goes back one hundred and thirty years and is complex. This history, as told in the pages of this monograph, documents the important details behind the founding of the NMSU geology program and its growth and evolution to 2015. The program's history is conveniently divided into three administrative phases. Phase I comprises the first 55 years, during which the program's activities were managed by one or two regular academic departments of the University. In the Earth Sciences phase, the geology program was administered as a division, along with one or two other divisions in the same department. In its third phase, the geology program became a regular academic department within the College of Arts and Sciences, its current status as the Department of Geological Sciences. Two obvious legacies of NMSU's geology program are the Department of Geological Sciences and the geophysics program in the Department of Physics. However, the program's legacy is also reflected in the students who have taken its courses and the program's research output through the efforts of its faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students. Since the mid-1960s, the geology program has produced a vast amount of research that has led to a sophisticated understanding of the geology of southern New Mexico and adjacent areas. Finally, through a better understanding of the geology program's academic evolution, the program's alumni and current students, faculty, and staff will have a more profound appreciation of their academic experience at New Mexico State University

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This publication can be downloaded for free or can be purchased as an on-demand printed book.

Are you looking for the perfect New Mexico-themed gift to give your favorite geologist (even if that geologist is you)? If so, check out these sizzling socks, featuring a map of the Valles Caldera! The caldera formed during two volcanic super-eruptions that took place 1.6 and 1.2 million years ago and were so powerful that erupted ash is found in Kansas, Utah and Wyoming!

This boxed set of six volumes provides the most comprehensive and extensive review of New Mexico’s energy and mineral resources to-date. Each volume focuses on the geologic nature of the resource, the history of the resource development in New Mexico, and their importance to the world and New Mexico’s economy. Written by New Mexico’s own experts in the fields, this set covers energy resources of petroleum, natural gas, coal, uranium, and geothermal, along with the resources of metals and industrial minerals and rocks.

This memoir is published jointly by the New Mexico Bureau of Geology & Mineral Resources and the New Mexico Geological Society.

Energy and Mineral Resources of New Mexico, NMBGMR, Memoir 50 and NMGS Special Publication 13 (six-volume boxed set)

A: Petroleum Geology — Ronald F. Broadhead

B: Coal Resources — Gretchen K. Hoffman

C: Uranium Resources — Virginia T. McLemore and William L. Chenoweth

D: Metallic Mineral Deposits — Virginia T. McLemore and Virgil W. Lueth

E: Industrial Minerals and Rocks — Virginia T. McLemore and George S. Austin

F: Overview of the Valles Caldera (Baca) Geothermal System — Fraser Goff and Cathy J. Goff

This Resource Map locates and describes 246 mining areas in New Mexico (excluding coal fields). The included booklet begins with a brief description of the history of mining in New Mexico and is followed by discussions of previous work, mining claims, the definition of a mining district, mining methods, and classification of mineral deposits. Short descriptions of individual mining districts and prospect areas in New Mexico are in Appendix 1. Appendix 2 includes metal production from selected districts. Appendix 3 is a summary of previous mining districts maps. This report updates File and Northrop (1966), Howard (1967), and Mardirosian (1971), the last comprehensive summaries of all mining districts in New Mexico.

The Geologic Map of the Mount Taylor Volcano Area, New Mexico is a 1:36,000 compilation of six recent NMBGMR 1:24,000 geologic quadrangles that encompass this extinct composite stratovolcano. Mount Taylor is New Mexico’s second-largest volcano after the Valles Caldera in the Jemez Mountains. This timely map and accompanying report, resulting from over a decade of thorough work, synthesizes the current geologic understanding of such an important landscape feature of the state.

For such a complex volcanic landform, the report provides an exhaustive description of the volcano area in an easy-to-read format. In addition to providing a detailed description of each of the map’s 339 units and dikes, it documents the volcano’s history and history of research, its geochemical and petrographic composition, the phases of its construction ranging from the initial to the terminal eruptions, 3.72–1.26 million years ago, and its subsequent erosion, resulting in the summit Amphitheater and its extensive apron of debris. It describes the surrounding volcanic centers, the structure of the area, and the extensive dikes and maars. After touching on the water resources, hydrothermal alteration and mineralization, and geothermal potential, the report concludes with a conceptual model of volcano evolution.

Available folded or rolled on field-durable media. There is also a puzzle version of this geologic map.

The Rio Grande is the fourth longest river in North America. Flowing nearly 2,000 miles from Colorado to the Gulf of Mexico, in New Mexico it occupies the Rio Grande Valley, where it provides water for habitat, agriculture, and a growing population. In northern New Mexico, where the river has carved a pair of spectacular canyons, the Rio Grande also provides some of the most exceptional recreation opportunities and scenery in North America. This comprehensive, spiral bound, river-friendly, 122-page river guide provides detailed, full-color maps of 153 miles of the Rio Grande, from Lasauses, Colorado to Cochiti Dam in New Mexico. Divided into eleven river stretches—including the popular whitewater runs in the Taos Box, Racecourse, and White Rock Canyon—the guide covers stretches that range in difficulty from placid canoe tours to gripping kayak descents. The river maps are developed on an aerial photographic base (digital orthophoto quads), allowing the user to more easily identify locations.

Minor updates were made to text and figures for reprinting in 2022.

Few places in the U.S. boast as rich a diversity of landscape and public lands as northern New Mexico. Here in one volume is an authoritative overview of the geology of these parks, monuments, and public lands, with information on the regional setting, the rock record, and the most prominent geologic features. The book includes chapters on nine national parks and monuments, seventeen state parks, and many of the most popular Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service units in this part of the state. Also included are chapters on two of our newer units, the Valles Caldera National Preserve and Kashe-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument. With nearly 300 full-color geologic maps, graphics, and photographs, the book is a perfect introduction to the some of New Mexico's most significant geologic landscapes.

Free sample chapter—Ghost Ranch (4 MB PDF)

The interior of this mug has a reproduction of our Geologic Map of the Valles Caldera. The caldera once was filled by a lake, but you can fill it with coffee, tea, or whatever else satisfies your inner volcanologist.

The 135-mile Rio Chama of northern New Mexico is a major tributary of the Rio Grande. From its alpine headwaters at the Continental Divide of the glaciated San Juan Mountains in southern Colorado, this hidden gem flows across the Colorado Plateau in a spectacular canyon cut into Mesozoic sedimentary rocks, in places up to 1,500 feet deep. Towering, vibrant, sandstone cliffs, heavily wooded side canyons, superb camping, and a diversity of historical sites offer an outstanding wild river backdrop for the boater, angler, hiker, or camper.

This book contains detailed river maps of the seven sections of the Rio Chama, plus its three resplendent reservoirs, from the Colorado headwaters to its confluence with the Rio Grande near Española. The Chama Canyon section, below El Vado Dam and through the Chama Canyon Wilderness, is one of the finest, multi-day, whitewater trips in the Southwest.

Mirror Lake, one of seven sinkhole lakes, or cenotes, in Bottomless Lakes State Park, is located at the downgradient end of the regional hydrologic system in the Roswell Artesian Basin. Recharge to the artesian aquifer occurs on the Pecos Slope west of Roswell by direct infiltration from precipitation and by runoff from intermittent losing streams flowing eastward across the San Andres limestone outcrop. Groundwater flows east and south, then upward through leaky overlying gypsum confining beds of the Seven Rivers Formation in the Pecos River Valley, where the potentiometric surface in the artesian aquifer is above ground level. Dissolution of gypsum beds caused by this upward artesian flow created and continues to enlarge the cenotes along the Seven Rivers Escarpment. Overflow from Lea Lake, the southernmost and largest of the Bottomless Lakes sinkholes, amounts to roughly 15,000 acre-ft/yr and has caused an expansion of wetlands to the west, which are now hydraulically connected to the Pecos River, resulting in a net gain in streamflow and an increase in salinity in the river downstream from the park.

The gentle eastward regional dip of the area is locally reversed along the escarpment, where strata of the Seven Rivers Formation dip abruptly southwest by as much as 40°. This local dip reversal, clearly visible in the walls of Mirror Lake, is probably not tectonic but the result of subsurface dissolution of gypsum by ascending artesian groundwater and consequent slumping of overlying beds.

There are two versions of this guidebook available, the complete guidebook (152 pages), and a version with just the road logs that is spiral bound (76 pages).