Additional title page description: A study of the Green River Formation in a 2,300-square-mile area in northeastern Utah and northwestern Colorado.

This volume presents a suite of detailed stratigraphic and sedimentologic investigations of the Eocene Green River Formation of Wyoming, Colorado and Utah, one of the world’s foremost terrestrial archives of lacustrine and alluvial deposition during the warmest portion of the early Cenozoic. Its twelve chapters encompass the rich and varied record of lacustrine stratigraphy, sedimentology, geochronology, geochemistry and paleontology. Chapters 2-9 provide detailed member-scale synthesis of Green River Formation strata within the Greater Green River, Fossil, Piceance Creek and Uinta Basins, while its final two chapters address its enigmatic evaporite deposits and ichnofossils at broad, interbasinal scale.

Investigations about porosity in petroleum reservoir rocks are discussed by Schmoker and Gautier. Pollastro discusses the uses of clay minerals as exploration tools that help to elucidate basin, source-rock, and reservoir history. The status of fission-track analysis, which is useful for determining the thermal and depositional history of deeply buried sedimentary rocks, is outlined by Naeser. The various ways workers have attempted to determine accurate ancient and present-day subsurface temperatures are summarized with numerous references by Barker. Clayton covers three topics: (1) the role of kinetic modeling in petroleum exploration, (2) biological markers as an indicator of depositional environment of source rocks and composition of crude oils, and (3) geochemistry of sulfur in source rocks and petroleum. Anders and Hite evaluate the current status of evaporite deposits as a source for crude oil.