| Kiowa Shale | |
|---|---|
| Stratigraphic range: Albian around | |
| Type | Kansas: Formation |
| Sub-units | Longford |
| Underlies | Dakota Formation |
| Overlies |
|
| Lithology | |
| Primary | shale |
| Other | mudstone, lignite (with amber) |
| Location | |
| Country | United States |
| Type section | |
| Named for | Kiowa County, Kansas [1] |
| Named by | Cragin, F.W., 1894 [1] |
The Kiowa Formation or Kiowa Shale is a Cretaceous geologic formation in Kansas, diminishing to member status in Colorado and Oklahoma. In Colorado, the Kiowa Shale was classified as a member of the now abandoned [2] Purgatoire Formation. [1] In the vicinity of Longford, Kansas, the local Longford member comprises thinly bedded siltstone, clay, polished gravel, lignite, and sandstone suggests a river and estuary environment. [3]
In other regions, the same strata is called Skull Creek Shale, named after its exposure in Skull Creek, in Wyoming. [4]
At the time of the classification of the Kiowa (later 1900s), units were defined primarily by appearance and content in the context of the succession of fossils; and marine (ocean) sediments and fossils were generally assigned to units separate from terrestrial (land) sediments and fossils.
From the final, Late-Permian retreat of the Midcontinent Seaway to the Mid-Cretaceous, some 200 million years, the lands of future Kansas and neighboring states were raised well above sea level. The marine Permian rocks of the Midcontinent Seaway were exposed to the atmosphere and eroded by wind, rain, and rivers. Some terrestrial soils accumulated in the Jurassic, raising the Red Hills of southern Kansas and western Oklahoma. [4]
Broadly, the definition of the Kiowa unit is restricted to marine deposits, mostly the massive shale. Pyrite-rich (iron disulfide) terrestrial mud, sand, and gravel below the marine shale are assigned to the Cheyenne Sandstone formation. The Limonite-rich (iron oxidide) terrestrial sands and muds above the marine shale are assigned to the base of the (lower) Dakota Formation in Kansas, the "J" oil sands of the Denver Basin, the Muddy Sandstone, or other correlating rocks. [4]
Approximately 160 million years (Ma) ago, the Sevier orogeny commenced the subduction of the oceanic Farallon Plate underneath the continental North American Plate. With the unusual shallow subduction of the Farallon Plate, a broad and shallow seaway began to open generally north and south over the North American continent, named the Western Interior Seaway. As the sea water widened (transgressed) over the midcontinent, the east shore advanced over low plains. As that shoreline advanced, a thick layer of river mud and sand (Cheyenne) was deposited over the exposed Permian and Jurassic rocks of those plains. As the seawater spread and deepened, the deeper water deposited finer erosional sediments resulting in shale (Kiowa). After a few million years, the land rose and the seawater retreated, leaving a return to terrestrial sand, gravel, and mud (lower Dakota). Together, the Cheyenne, Kiowa, and lower Dakota record the first sequence of the Western Interior Seaway, referred to as the Skull Creek/Kiowa Cycle, and the particular time-constrained marine environment is named the Skull Creek/Kiowa Sea. Later cycles of the interior sea would follow, including the Greenhorn Sea and the Niobrara Sea [4]
Coronado Heights is a public park established on one of the Dakota remnant hills forming the hummocky outliers of the Smoky Hill Buttes range of the Smoky Hills. While the tops of the buttes are resistant red Dakota sandstone, the first three hairpin turns of the access road climb up a slope of grass-covered Kiowa Shale. Small exposures of Kiowa Shale may be found along these turns or the nearby foot paths.
The City of Salina was developed on a flat flood plain between the Smoky Hill River and the Saline River. However, just across a turn of the Smoky Hill River from the South to the East, the southeast corner of Salina rises upon a gently sloped bluff of tough shale (Wellington Formation). That landmark bluff is topped by the lower sandstones of the Kiowa Shale, possibly the "Longford Member" or similar material. Atop the hill in Indian Rock Park lie many sandstone outcrops and large sandstone boulders as remnants of the base of the Kiowa Shale.
The exposed geology of the Bryce Canyon area in Utah shows a record of deposition that covers the last part of the Cretaceous Period and the first half of the Cenozoic era in that part of North America. The ancient depositional environment of the region around what is now Bryce Canyon National Park varied from the warm shallow sea in which the Dakota Sandstone and the Tropic Shale were deposited to the cool streams and lakes that contributed sediment to the colorful Claron Formation that dominates the park's amphitheaters.
The exposed geology of the Capitol Reef area presents a record of mostly Mesozoic-aged sedimentation in an area of North America in and around Capitol Reef National Park, on the Colorado Plateau in southeastern Utah.
The San Juan Basin is a geologic structural basin located near the Four Corners region of the Southwestern United States. The basin covers 7,500 square miles and resides in northwestern New Mexico, southwestern Colorado, and parts of Utah and Arizona. Specifically, the basin occupies space in the San Juan, Rio Arriba, Sandoval, and McKinley counties in New Mexico, and La Plata and Archuleta counties in Colorado. The basin extends roughly 100 miles (160 km) N-S and 90 miles (140 km) E-W.
The Dakota is a sedimentary geologic unit name of formation and group rank in Midwestern North America. The Dakota units are generally composed of sandstones, mudstones, clays, and shales deposited in the Mid-Cretaceous opening of the Western Interior Seaway. The usage of the name Dakota for this particular Albian-Cenomanian strata is exceptionally widespread; from British Columbia and Alberta to Montana and Wisconsin to Colorado and Kansas to Utah and Arizona. It is famous for producing massive colorful rock formations in the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains of the United States, and for preserving both dinosaur footprints and early deciduous tree leaves.
The Naturita Formation is a classification used in western Colorado and eastern Utah for a Cretaceous Period sedimentary geologic formation. This name was "applied to the upper or carbonaceous part of Dakota Group" by R.G. Young in 1960, naming it for Naturita, Colorado. The name is not used by U.S. Geological Survey authors, but has found growing acceptance by the Utah Geological Survey
The geology of Kansas encompasses the geologic history and the presently exposed rock and soil. Rock that crops out in the US state of Kansas was formed during the Phanerozoic eon, which consists of three geologic eras: the Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic. Paleozoic rocks at the surface in Kansas are primarily from the Mississippian, Pennsylvanian, and Permian periods.
The Niobrara Formation, also called the Niobrara Chalk, is a geologic formation in North America that was deposited between 87 and 82 million years ago during the Coniacian, Santonian, and Campanian stages of the Late Cretaceous. It is composed of two structural units, the Smoky Hill Chalk Member overlying the Fort Hays Limestone Member. The chalk formed from the accumulation of coccoliths from microorganisms living in what was once the Western Interior Seaway, an inland sea that divided the continent of North America during much of the Cretaceous. It underlies much of the Great Plains of the US and Canada. Evidence of vertebrate life is common throughout the formation and includes specimens of plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, pterosaurs, and several primitive aquatic birds. The type locality for the Niobrara Chalk is the Niobrara River in Knox County in northeastern Nebraska. The formation gives its name to the Niobrara cycle of the Western Interior Seaway.
Colorado is a geologic name applied to certain rocks of Cretaceous age in the North America, particularly in the western Great Plains. This name was originally applied to classify a group of specific marine formations of shale and chalk known for their importance in Eastern Colorado. The surface outcrop of this group produces distinctive landforms bordering the Great Plains and it is a significant feature of the subsurface of the Denver Basin and the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin. These formations record important sequences of the Western Interior Seaway. As the geology of this seaway was studied, this name came to be used in states beyond Colorado but later was replaced in several of these states with more localized names.
The Fox Hills Formation is a Cretaceous geologic formation in the northwestern Great Plains of North America. It is present from Alberta on the north to Colorado in the south.
The Straight Cliffs Formation is a stratigraphic unit in the Kaiparowits Plateau of south central Utah. It is Late Cretaceous in age and contains fluvial, paralic, and marginal marine (shoreline) siliciclastic strata. It is well exposed around the margin of the Kaiparowits Plateau in the Grand Staircase – Escalante National Monument in south central Utah. The formation is named after the Straight Cliffs, a long band of cliffs creating the topographic feature Fiftymile Mountain.
The Carlile Shale is a Turonian age Upper/Late Cretaceous series shale geologic formation in the central-western United States, including in the Great Plains region of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming.
The Spearfish Formation is a geologic formation, originally described from the Black Hills region of South Dakota, United States, but also recognised in North Dakota, Wyoming, Montana and Nebraska. It is a heterogeneous red bed formation, commonly with siltstone and gypsum low in the formation and sandstone and shale higher up. Other rock types include claystone, conglomerate, dolomite, and oil shale. It is typically regarded as Permian–Triassic in age, although its original description included Jurassic rocks.
The Graneros Shale is a geologic formation in the United States identified in the Great Plains as well as New Mexico that dates to the Cenomanian Age of the Cretaceous Period. It is defined as the finely sandy argillaceous or clayey near-shore/marginal-marine shale that lies above the older, non-marine Dakota sand and mud, but below the younger, chalky open-marine shale of the Greenhorn. This definition was made in Colorado by G. K. Gilbert and has been adopted in other states that use Gilbert's division of the Benton's shales into Carlile, Greenhorn, and Graneros. These states include Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and New Mexico as well as corners of Minnesota and Iowa. North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana have somewhat different usages — in particular, north and west of the Black Hills, the same rock and fossil layer is named Belle Fourche Shale.
The Greenhorn Limestone or Greenhorn Formation is a geologic formation in the Great Plains Region of the United States, dating to the Cenomanian and Turonian ages of the Late Cretaceous period. The formation gives its name to the Greenhorn cycle of the Western Interior Seaway.
The Wellington Formation is an Early Permian geologic formation in Kansas and Oklahoma. The formation's Hutchinson Salt Member is more recognized by the community than the formation itself, and the salt is still mined in central Kansas. The Wellington provides a rich record of Permian insects and its beddings provide evidence for reconstruction of tropical paleoclimates of the Icehouse Permian with the ability in cases to measure the passage of seasons. Tens of thousands of insect fossil recovered from the Wellington shales are kept in major collections at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology and Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.
The Tucumcari Formation is a geologic formation in New Mexico. It preserves fossils dating back to the Albian Age of the early Cretaceous period.
The geology of South Dakota began to form more than 2.5 billion years ago in the Archean eon of the Precambrian. Igneous crystalline basement rock continued to emplace through the Proterozoic, interspersed with sediments and volcanic materials. Large limestone and shale deposits formed during the Paleozoic, during prevalent shallow marine conditions, followed by red beds during terrestrial conditions in the Triassic. The Western Interior Seaway flooded the region, creating vast shale, chalk and coal beds in the Cretaceous as the Laramide orogeny began to form the Rocky Mountains. The Black Hills were uplifted in the early Cenozoic, followed by long-running periods of erosion, sediment deposition and volcanic ash fall, forming the Badlands and storing marine and mammal fossils. Much of the state's landscape was reworked during several phases of glaciation in the Pleistocene. South Dakota has extensive mineral resources in the Black Hills and some oil and gas extraction in the Williston Basin. The Homestake Mine, active until 2002, was a major gold mine that reached up to 8000 feet underground and is now used for dark matter and neutrino research.
The geology of North Dakota includes thick sequences oil and coal bearing sedimentary rocks formed in shallow seas in the Paleozoic and Mesozoic, as well as terrestrial deposits from the Cenozoic on top of ancient Precambrian crystalline basement rocks. The state has extensive oil and gas, sand and gravel, coal, groundwater and other natural resources.
The Lytle Formation or Lytle Sandstone is a geologic formation found in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico.
The Glencairn Formation is a geologic formation found in Colorado and New Mexico. It preserves fossils characteristic of the Albian Age of the Cretaceous Period.
Use of Purgatoire formation in Tucumcari-Sabinoso area, Guadalupe, Harding, San Miguel, and Quay Cos, northeast NM in the Palo Duro basin and on the Sierra Grande uplift abandoned [should read "areally restricted"].
Term Purgatoire abandoned. Both Lytle and Glencairn are mappable at 1:24,000, and they are separated by a disconformity--the most significant break in the Lower Cretaceous. Authors believe there is no reason to retain them as member rank or to raise the Purgatoire to group rank.
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