The Rio Grande Embayment

I was so tired one evening after work a while back I could only crawl out of the truck and make it as far as the back door. Ms. Catherine had a scotch and soda already made and sweating properly; it had cooled down to a pleasant 100 under the eve of the porch, the S.E wind almost pleasant. I took my boots off to let my shriveled-up feet air out and just sat there, in zoned out contemplation of the days events.

It occured to me that upside down I could make my left hand look like Texas and the cement under it the Gulf of Mexico. She brought me another drink and my hand started to look a perfect structure map of the Gulf Coast Basin/Rio Grande Embayment, to about 200 miles offshore. Southeast of Brownsville in 400 feet of water the subsurface is broken into many different fault blocks. In the Burgos Basin of Mexico, where those big growth faults are, Eni just made a big discovery.

If you look closely you can see the Frio to Vicksburg Fault System onshore in the tip of Texas, where the river dumps out at Boca Chica; surface anomolies from buried salt features pookin' out of the Eocene to Miocene transition existed along the coastline. This is awesome, I thought! I am pretty sure I saw the Stewart City Reef Margin, with deep Edwards wells along it and definitely saw the San Marcos Arch as things start roll over into the East Texas Basin. The black blood blister is Dallas, just for reference sake, and that big ugly vein is the Mid Continent Rift as it wanders north thru Missouri and Iowa.

Sometimes you get so tired this is all your mind has left to give up. So... you roll with it. I even took a picture. I turned my hand over to look at the calluses and burn scars, thought it was going to take a wire brush to ever get them clean again, then went back to my map.

West and slightly south of Dallas you can clearly see the Central Platform of the Permian and what appears to be 30,000 Wolfcamp laterals on both sides in the Delaware and Midland sub basins. The Val Verde Basin south of there is a big crease.

Back south, in the Tampico region of Northeastern Mexico, below the Burgos Basin, sort of where the famous Golden Lane was discovered back in 1906, that's just a big ugly blister from shoveling dirt all day. It has nothing to do with my structure map, sorry. Just out of the photo in the bottom left is the Bay of Campeche and the Super Giant, Cantrell Field.

Out there in the Middle of the Gulf of Mexico a big meteor hit earth 66 million years ago, sent 10,000 degree plasma all over the North American continent and fried all the dinosaurs into lumps of carbon matter. It blew big prehistoric fish the size of boats all the way up into South Dakota. That must have been a helluva thing.

I sat there for a few more minutues and thought with one more scotch and I might find a place to drill a well and test a new fault block!

Damn my hands look I am 93 years old.

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See ! I told 'ya.