Monday, 15 September, 2025/ Edition 76

Last week, Danile Minisini (AAPG Bulletin Editor) and I gave an AAPG Academy Webinar on the geoscience-energy nexus. A huge “Thank You” to those of you who could attend. For this week’s edition of Core Elements, I have picked three interesting stories from Wyoming, Nevada, and Arizona. I hope you find them informative as well.

Rasoul Sorkhabi

Editor, Core Elements

Deepest CO₂ Injection Well in the USA

Sweetwater Carbon Hub and Class VI injection well (source: DOE and University of Wyoming)

Frontier Infrastructure Holdings, a developer of low-carbon infrastructures across the US Mountain West and Texas, in partnership with the University of Wyoming’s School of Energy Resources, has successfully completed a deep well for carbon storage in Wyoming. Let’s take a look.

Location:

• Sweetwater Carbon Hub in Wyoming’s Sweetwater County is a key program to advance commercial-scale carbon sequestration.

• It spans more than 100,000 acres in southwest Wyoming.

• It is supported by the US Department of Energy’s CarbonSAFE initiative.

Injection well:

• The J1-15 well drilled by Frontier is a Class VI well drilled to a depth of 18,437 feet – the deepest of its kind in the USA.

• The well was initially drilled to access the Jurassic-age Nugget Sandstone but was deepened to reach the Mississippian-age Madison Limestone - a high porosity reservoir rock.

• This is the second such well drilled by Frontier. The first well (SCS-1) was drilled to a depth of more than 16,000 feet and completed at the Nugget Sandstone.

Class VI Well: The Underground Injection Control program of the US Environmental Protection Agency includes six classes of injection wells, based on the type and depth of the injection activity.

• Class VI wells are used for the injection of carbon dioxide into underground subsurface rock formations for long-term storage, or geologic sequestration.

Go deeper: Read the full report here.

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Lithium from Yellowstone Hotspot

Volcanic trail of Yellowstone Hotspot (source: Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology)

In Core Elements 45, we reviewed a study of rich lithium in McDermitt Caldera in Nevada. A new study in Geology expands on this and considers the McDermitt Caldera as part of the Yellowstone Hotspot track.

Yellowstone Hotspot:

• Yellowstone Hotspot is in Yellowstone National Park in the northwestern corner of Wyoming – the world’s first national park designated in 1872.

• As the North American continental plate has moved over this mantle plume, a trail of volcanic calderas has formed, extending from McDermitt (the oldest, at 16-17 Ma) to the Yellowstone Plateau (the youngest, at 2 Ma).

The New Study: Kathryn Watts of the US Geological Survey compared the concentrations of lithium in melt-inclusions in quartz crystals in volcanic rocks of various calderas in the Yellowstone Hotspot track. She used an ion microprobe for these measurements.

Results: The study found that calderas in the western part of the Yellowstone hotspot track, including McDermitt, are 200-2000 parts per million, while those in the eastern part, including Picabo caldera and the Yellowstone plateau, are less than 200 parts per million.

Interpretation: This difference in lithium concentrations may be related to different crustal types.

• McDermitt and adjacent calderas developed in a transitional crust dominated by metasedimentary rocks, while the eastern calderas formed in purely continental crust of North America.

• It seems that partial melting of crust with hydrous minerals, especially biotite, leads to more lithium-enriched melts.

Why it matters: This study is a contribution toward understanding the eruptive versus post-eruptive mobility of lithium in volcanic rocks.

Go deeper: Read the full article here.

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Meteor Crater’s Impact on the Grand Canyon

From Meteor Crater to Grand Canyon (source: Wikipedia Commons)

The Meteor Crater and the Grand Canyon are two iconic and often-visited geological sites in Arizona. A study published in Geology suggests a story that connects these two.

Meteor Crater:

• Meteor Crater, located 60 km southeast of Flagstaff in northern Arizona, is about 1200 meters wide and 170 meters deep and was created by a meteorite impact about 56,000 years ago.

• It is named the Barringer Crater after Daniel Barringer, who believed the meteorite would be a rich source of iron.

• The Barringer family still owns the Meteor Crater, although it was designated a National Natural Landmark in 1967.

Landslides in Grand Canyon: Karlstrom and colleagues in Geology argue that the Meteor Crater impact triggered a landslide in Grand Canyon, which then dammed the Colorado River and formed a paleolake they call Nankoweap.

The researchers suggest that the landslide was caused by an impact-generated earthquake of magnitude 5.4.

Lines of Evidence:

• The researchers determined the ages of four driftwood samples collected from two caves – Santon’s Cave and Crystal Cave, both located in the Mississippian-age Redwall Limestone of Marble Canyon – along a section of the Colorado River upstream of Grand Canyon. These driftwood samples, dated by the Carbon-14 method, gave an age of 55,250 ± 2,440 years old.

• The researchers also dated sediments associated with the driftwood samples. Two sediment samples dated by the luminescence method gave an age of 56,000 ± 6,390 years old.

• The ages of driftwood and sediment samples overlap with the age of the Meteor Crater impact.

Hypothesized Nankoweap Lake:

• The evidence for paleo-dam materials comes from large boulders of Kaibab Limestone in a fine-grained breccia of Paleozoic rock debris at the Nankoweap Creek delta.

• The Kaibab Limestone blocks were probably derived from the cliffs on the opposite (east) side of the Colorado River.

Why it matters: It is important to understand the environmental changes of meteor impacts, and the Barringer Crater offers a case study of a relatively recent event.

Go deeper: Read the full report here.

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✉️ To get in touch with Rasoul, send an email to editorial@aapg.org.