Stacked Channel Margins at a Base of Slope: Integrating Behind-Outcrop Cores from Permian Deepwater Upper Brushy Canyon, Central Delaware Mountains, West Texas
Jesse Melick
Abstract:
Outcrop analogs provide important windows into specific depositional settings, which, in the Permian upper Brushy Canyon Formation, permit broader understanding of deepwater slope and basin sediment transport and storage. Pairing sedimentological detail of behind-outcrop core with correlative sandbody architecture in the outcrop face just tens of meters away provides a unique opportunity to tie reservoir quality to sandstone presence and continuity. These results are applicable to conventional and unconventional resource extraction, as well as waste injection efforts.
The nearly continuous outcrop belt of the 4th-order upper Brushy Canyon intersects multiple point sources of episodic fine-grained siliciclastic sediment input, between the upper slope pinchout in the Guadalupe Mountains and base of slope. An oblique dip view becomes predominantly strike oriented to eastward paleocurrent directions in the Buena Vista 2km-wide study area, 25km south of the updip pinchout. The UBC contains three siltstone bounded 5th-order stratigraphic cycles, two sand-rich Fans 6 and 7, and a siltstone-rich genetic top succession.
Outcrops at the Buena Vista locale contain many erosional surfaces that form composite channel margins at several scales. Whether they are decameter high master cuts or smaller meter-scale truncations that stack to form a conspicuous larger composite feature is still debated. This presentation will compare outcrop-scale body geometries and surface correlations with the detailed sedimentology captured in core behind the exposed cliff face to shed some much-needed light on this conundrum.
Bio:
Jesse Melick is a field geologist by training, gaining BSc and MSc degrees from Colorado School of Mines, working outcrops of west Texas. He then completed a 3-year Pre-Doctoral program studying outcrops in Italy and Spain with Emiliano Mutti. Back in the US with his now Italian wife, Jesse studied outcrops and subsurface data from the Powder River Basin for his PhD at Montana State University.
He recently retired from bp after 14 years generating/refining stratigraphic frameworks, assembling basin-scale playbooks, and instructing and mentoring in-house .
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