The purpose of this field trip is to provide an explorationist with an enhanced working knowledge of how to analyze deepwater clastics. The area concerned with is the western part of the Permian Basin, the Delaware Basin. The specific field area is 100 miles east of El Paso and involves the southern part of the Guadeloupe Mountains southwest of Carlsbad, and the uplifted area to the south called the Delaware Mountains. The field area is entirely in the state of Texas.

A brief summary of the stratigraphy is as follows:

A Lower Permian carbonate margin built southward into the Delaware Basin. A drop in sea level shifted the siliciclastic facies belt to the shelf edge. These sands and silts were funneled through submarine canyons into the basin as a series of clastic units are the Brushy Canyon, which has no shelfal equivalent.

The Brushy Canyon is a producing horizon in the Delaware Basin. The deepwater clastics have an estimated 10,000,000,000 barrels in place, making it one of our largest deepwater accumulations of the Permian Basin. The Brushy is difficult to produce because of it's tightly cemented matrix.

Controversy has surrounded the interpretations of the mode of deposition of the Brushy: density flows, turbidity flows, salinity flows, etc. The proximal facies occurs in Guadeloupe National Park.

The medial and distal facies are beautifully displayed to the south in the Delaware Mountains. There is a belt of exposures 15 miles long and three to five miles wide with up to 1000 feet of reflect which exposes the medial and distal Brushy. Because of the lack of vegetation, superb three-dimensional exposures are available.

The massive channel deposits, are indeed spectacular. There are also excellent exposures of the fine- grained facies and these provide a very important insight into the total depositional system of the basinal clastics. The rocks provide a stunning analog for fields in the North Sea and Gulf of Mexico because of the changes in the channel bedforms of the sandstones, and proximal/distal sand/shale ratios as one traces the rocks into the basin. The field trip is conducted on both the proximal and medial/distal portions of the Brushy Canyon.

Duration: Five days

Attendees: Geologists, Geophysicists and Engineers