Overview of Our Group

Faults can function as high permeability pathways that enhance subsurface fluid flow or as low permeability barriers that impede subsurface fluid flow, and as a consequence can exert a strong influence on flow and transport processes in faulted aquifers, petroleum reservoirs, and host rocks.

The Faults and Fluids Group at New Mexico Tech consists of faculty and graduate student researchers in the Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences, the Deparment of Mathematics, and the New Mexico Bureau of Mines & Mineral Resources. By way of informal collaboration, we bring together expertise in structural geology, geomechanics, geochemistry, petrology, hydrology, and mathematical modeling to address the interrelationship between faults and fluid flow.

Our work is concentrated in several areas:

  • The role of faults as hydrogeologic units in unconsolidated alluvial aquifer systems along the Rio Grande rift. We are using a combination of detailed mapping of exhumed fault zones along the flanks of the rift, air permeameter studies of faulted basin-fill deposits, petrographic and geochemical studies fault rocks, and deterministic and stochastic modeling of flow and transport in faulted aquifer systems.

  • The role of fractures as conduits and seals for petroleum in the San Juan Basin of northwestern New Mexico, as well as the Teapot Dome of Wyoming.

  • Seismic signatures and petrophysics of overpressured decollements in active accretionary prisms.

  • Basin evolution, groundwater flow and heat transport, and hydrofracture generation.

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    created by Bill Haneberg, maintained by Laurel Goodwin and Peter Mozley
    last modified 10/15/98