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### Geology of the Guadalupe Mountains, New Mexico

#### Professional Paper 446

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#### Links

- Document: **Report**                                 (57.37 
  MB pdf)
- Plates:
- **Plate 1**                                 
    (38.62 MB pdf)
- **Plate 2**                                 
    (638.29 kB pdf)
- **Plate 3**                                 
    (1.23 MB pdf)
- Download citation as:  RIS

#### Abstract

After the discovery of oil in Permian rocks in Winkler County, Tex., in 1920, 
petroleum exploration intensified in adjacent parts of western Texas and 
southeastern New Mexico. Almost immediately unusual stratigraphic complexities 
were discovered in the Permian rocks. Thus began a long period of stratigraphic 
investigations, chiefly reconnaissance studies, of the Permian rocks of the 
Guadalupe Mountains of Texas and New Mexico. Before 1930 some of the 
complexities began to be resolved as several geologists almost simultaneously 
recognized the great barrier reef of Capitan age which separates rocks of 
radically different character. To the northwest is a great sequence of rocks 
deposited on a platform area, whereas to the southeast lie the rocks of the 
Delaware basin. The relations of the basin rocks to the rocks of the reef zone 
were lucidly described by P. B. King (1942, 1948), but confusion and differences 
of opinion continued about the relations of the shelf rocks to their 
correlatives in the basin. The present investigation is an attempt, by means of 
detailed areal mapping, to resolve the relations of the shelf-rock units to one 
another and to the reef and basin rocks and to clarify the confusing 
stratigraphic nomenclature.

#### Study Area



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